Yahoo News John Heard: actor best known for Home Alone movies
American actor John Heard shot to fame as Peter McCallister, the father who unintentionally leaves his seven-year-old son behind when he takes his close and extended family on a Christmas holiday in Home Alone, the 1990 movie that made a child star of Macaulay Culkin.
Catherine O’Hara played Heard’s screen wife, Kate. “At the time, we didn’t know the movie was funny,” he said. “We were playing the parents who lost their kid, so we didn’t how funny-stupid we could be.”
The actors milked it to the full when they reprised their roles, alongside Culkin again as Kevin, in Home Alone 2: Lost in New York (1992). Both films were massive commercial successes and remain favourites with Christmas TV viewers.
Heard was born in Washington, son of John, who worked in the Defence Secretary’s office, and Helen (née Sperling), who acted in community theatre. On leaving Gonzaga College High School, Clark University, in Worcester, Massachusetts, he studied drama at the Catholic University of America, Washington, but left before graduating because he was impatient to get on stage.
Heard was soon performing in Broadway productions and won an Obie Award for his performance as Cassio in Othello in the 1979 New York Shakespeare Festival.
His breakthrough film role was as the disturbed Vietnam War veteran of the title in Cutter’s Way (1981). “I’m a pretty lightweight guy, and it gave me a chance to play somebody who had a little more strength,” Heard once said.
He then played Natassja Kinski’s lover in Cat People (1982), a bartender trying to help the Mr Ordinary having a night of bizarre experiences in director Martin Scorsese’s black comedy After Hours (1985) and Geraldine Page’s son struggling to deal with his own past in The Trip to Bountiful (1985), the moving story of an elderly woman finally fulfilling her dream of returning to the Texas Gold Coast town of her childhood.
Later came parts as a theatre director falling for the best friend of one of his performers in Beaches (1988), the director of a hospital curing patients of a sleeping sickness in Awakenings (1990) and an FBI lawyer fatally investigating the murder of two Supreme Court justices in The Pelican Brief (1993).
On TV, Heard played Abe North in Dennis Potter’s adaptation of Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night (1985) and in later years found his best roles on the small screen.
He had runs as the corrupt detective Vin Makazian (1999-2004) in The Sopranos, earning him an Emmy nomination; the lawyer with a drink problem Kenwall Duquesne (2003-05) in CSI: Miami; and the Illinois state governor (2005-06) in Prison Break.
Heard was married and divorced three times – to actress Margot Kidder (1979-80, although the marriage lasted only six days), Sharon Petersen (1988-1996) and Lana Pritchard (2010, lasting seven months).
Max, the son born to him and Petersen, died last December. Heard is survived by their daughter Annika, and by his son Jack from an earlier relationship with actress Melissa Leo, as well as his sister, actress Cordis Heard.
John Matthew Heard, actor, born 7 March 1946, died 21 July 2017
