You do not encourage a dodo to fly: Harris Yulin (1937-2025) | Tribute

“We all die from the minute we were born. Go quickly. Do not waste it. Don’t do it waste it.

These words, whispered by the pensioner of Buddy fix in the terminal phase of Harris Yulin during the fourth season of the criminal drama of Netflix “Ozark”, feels strangely adapted to the 87 years of life of the actor of the character. An accomplished character actor, Yulin dug a niche for decades in Hollywood as one of these classic “guys” of a type that you rarely see.

If you wanted someone in the application of laws, large companies or national security orders (especially if said character was corrupt), you called Yulin. Need someone who could deliver a home joke with the same impassive efficiency as a threat? You called Yulin. He delivered nearly 200 performances on the screen until his death last Tuesday, all perfectly calibrated for a threat or maximum geality, depending on what the role provided.

Born in Los Angeles in 1937, Yulin began his life on the steps of an orphanage, where he was abandoned in children. Four months later, he was adopted by Russian Jewish parents who conferred his last name and raised it. But his trip to the theater came after “deceiving in Europe for a few years” after a visit to the army, he said in an interview, making small shows and a nightclub with William Burroughs. (“It was very fun,” he pointed out.) He finally landed at the UCLA, where he would study the theater with Jeff Corey, then made his debut outside Broadway in 1963 with The next time I sing for you.

Yulin would continue to build his good Broadway faith, especially as a practitioner of the works of William Shakespeare: he would have roles in A summer night dream,, Richard III, And Roy-JeanAs well as a famous turn as Hamlet in 1974. But this same decade, he would explode on the big screen in the anti-Western “Doc” of Frank Perry, playing Wyatt Earp to Doc Holliday from Stacy Keach. Even at his youngest on the screen, Yulin seems graying, seasoned, a presence deeply assured under this bald head and this thick mustache. He had the kind of eyes that could deeply hinder in your soul, a frowning of resolved eyebrows which could communicate everything, from disappointment to deep resentment.

Yulin takes twenty minutes to appear in his first film, “Doc”, but his presence is looming during the first act of Holliday’s trip. When they finally meet in a bar lounge, Yulin’s ear deplores the outlaws trying to make chaos in his down. Keach’s response looks like a metatextual omen of the types of roles that Yulin would spend his career to embody:

“If it was not for bad people, what would you do in life?”

Indeed, Yulin has made the whole career by playing all kinds of bad guys; In “Scarface”, he plays a ladle detective while trying to cut a piece of Tony Montana’s affairs. In 1994, “clear and present danger”, he played a corrupt national security advisor playing on both sides against each other in the war against drugs. “Training day”, corrupt detective. “HOUR RUSH 2”, an agent of the secret service who – you guessed it – is on the catch. Yulin had a role to fulfill, and he fulfilled him with enthusiasm; His characters were always filled with a kind of professional conviction, which he could transmit with a simple arched eyebrow or a deceptive sneer.

He also brought this energy to television, becoming a pillar of the medium for decades. “Kojak”, “Law & Order”, “Buffy The Vampire Slayer”, “Veep”, and the more all of them presented short but sweet, sunk by Yulin, who has always brought an intensity to steel eyes even to the smallest roles. (One of these guests turns, as a fixer implicitly connected to the crowd which removes the wife of Niles Crane, husbands from a legal jam for a price On “prasier”, it earned him an appointment to the Emmy.)

But for my money, the role that benefited from the maximum of the undoubted gravity of Yulin was the episode of the first season of “Duet” of “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine”, where he appears as a Visitor of Cardassian arrested at the station to be a criminal of war. The episode plays largely like a two-mayt between Aamon Marritza de Yulin and Kira Nerys de Nana Visitor, while the latter tries to identify the alleged role of Marritza in the Nazi occupation that his people, the Bajorans, suffered for decades in his hands. While the layers take off on the true identity of Marritza, Yulin modulates his performance in an expert manner through oars of science fiction prostheses of the 90s: first as a avoidant simple, then as a fanfaron commander happy to taunt Kira for her deception. Then, just like Kira discern the truth, we too: Marritza is not the cover of the mass murderer of Cardassian Gul Darhe’el – he just wanted to pretend to be Darhe’el to help ensure his own guilt for his complicity in the crimes of Cardassia, using martyr to help the Bajoran to heal.

In a single scene, Yulin demonstrates the type of range that adapted a character actor from his stature. He could stand with such immobility, transmitting volumes of spirit, wisdom and essentials of the world; He could evacuate the spleen with the best of them, looking at the daggers in the weakest of us; And he could decompose and cry at the weight of everything he has done, the vulnerability that finally wins among his graying stature.

This episode is a drop in the bucket compared to its work volumes before or since (including a 12 episodes on “Ozark” above, and it is well received in comedy on “The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt” and “Divorce”, among others). He could fill a costume or a cop or a set of spurs like no one else, and his face would only become more complex and fascinating to look with age: bald, bearded and bull like never.

But it is a testimony of the love and dedication of Yulin to the art of acting that he would continue to find new angles to play, and new ways of playing the angles he had been mastering for a long time, until his death this year. He never thought of retiring, as he admitted once in a 2010 interview:

“Retirement is not a thought that I can never entertain. You like what you do and you feel lucky to do so, finally, lucky that other people want to see it or help you do it. ”