‘Goodfellas’ & ‘Halloween’ Star Dead at 81 — Hollywood Loses a Legend
Beau Starr, one of Hollywood’s most recognizable character actors, has passed away at the age of 81. The news was confirmed to TMZ by his brother and fellow actor Mike Starr, who said Beau died peacefully of natural causes on April 24 in Vancouver, Canada.
Starr is perhaps best known to horror fans for his role as Sheriff Ben Meeker in ‘Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers’ in 1988, a role he reprised the following year in ‘Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers’.
His former manager Timothy Beal, as reported by TMZ, noted that Starr always had a warm appreciation for the franchise’s fanbase and consistently had positive interactions with those who loved those films.
Martin Scorsese fans will also remember Starr for his memorable supporting turn in ‘Goodfellas’, where he played the abusive father of Ray Liotta’s Henry Hill in the 1990 mob classic. His ‘Goodfellas’ co-star Christopher Serrone, who played the younger version of Henry Hill in the film, shared a tribute shortly after the news broke, writing, “Beau enjoyed a rich and meaningful life. He was a son, brother, father, grandfather, actor and NFL/CFL player. Please take a moment to help me remember a great guy. RIP.”
Born in New York in 1944, Starr’s path to Hollywood was anything but conventional, beginning with a career in professional football after studying at Hofstra University, including stints with the New York Jets practice squad and later the Montreal Alouettes and Hamilton Tiger-Cats of the Canadian Football League. He made his on-screen debut in the sketch comedy series ‘Bizarre’ in 1979 before landing his first feature film role in the 1982 Gene Wilder comedy ‘Hanky Panky’.
His most sustained television work came on the Canadian-American comedy-drama ‘Due South’, where he starred as Lieutenant Harding Welsh across nearly every episode of the show’s four-season run from 1994 to 1999. Beyond that, his screen credits spanned decades and genres, including ‘Born on the Fourth of July’, ‘Speed’, ‘Cinderella Man’, ‘Devil in a Blue Dress’, and ‘Fletch’, along with television appearances on ‘Knight Rider’, ‘The A-Team’, ‘MacGyver’, ‘Murder She Wrote’, and ‘NYPD Blue’, among many others.
Fan tributes flooded social media in the hours following the announcement, with many reflecting on the warmth and authority Starr brought to every role he inhabited.
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