Yahoo News Erich Anderson, ‘Felicity’ and ‘Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter’ Actor, Dies at 67
Erich Anderson, the familiar character actor who made his film debut in Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter, played Keri Russell’s father on Felicity and recurred on shows from Steven Bochco, has died. He was 67.
Anderson died Saturday after a “brutal struggle with cancer,” his wife of 21 years, actress Saxon Trainor, and her brother-in-law, Michael O’Malley, announced in an Instagram post.
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In Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (1984), Anderson portrayed Rob Dier, who while attempting to avenge his sister’s death meets his brutal end at the hands of Jason in a basement.
He appeared as Dr. Edward Porter, father of Russell’s Felicity Porter, in the 1998 pilot for Felicity, then returned for eight more episodes of the WB network show during its four-season run through 2002.
For Bochco, Anderson played pitcher Bobby Stang on NBC’s Bay City Blues in 1983-84 and drug dealer Don Kirkendall on ABC’s NYPD Blue in 2000, and he guest-starred on ABC’s Civil Wars in 1993.
Born in 1957 in Sagamahara, Japan, Edward Erich Anderson came from a military family. After graduating from Hilltop High School in Chula Vista, California, he earned a degree in biochemistry and molecular biology from the University of California Santa Barbara.
The short-lived Bay City Blues represented one of his first onscreen gigs.
Anderson also portrayed Billy Sidel, a comic-book artist who has a romance with and weds Polly Draper’s Ellyn Warren, on ABC’s thirtysomething in 1990-91 and recurred in 2017-18 as Phil Gentry, a wealthy parent seeking to get a traffic ticket taken care of by Titus Welliver’s cop on Prime Video’s Bosch.
Over the years, Anderson worked on shows from Murder, She Wrote, Dallas, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Sisters and 7th Heaven to Chicago Hope, The X-Files, Boston Public, Boomtown, House, Monk and Franklin & Bash.
His film résumé included turns in Patty Hearst (1988), Bat*21 (1988), The Glass Shield (1994), Nightwatch (1997), Beyond Suspicion (2000), Unfaithful (2002) and The Neighbor (2017).
He also published three novels: 2012’s Hallowed Be Thy Name, 2014’s Thy Kingdom Come and 2022’s Rabbit: A Golf Fable.
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