Peter Jason, Actor in ‘Deadwood’ and Films for Walter Hill and John Carpenter, Dies at 80
Peter Jason, the extremely busy character actor who appeared in nine features for Walter Hill and seven for John Carpenter and portrayed the card dealer-turned-reverend Con Stapleton on HBO’s Deadwood, has died. He was 80.
Jason died Thursday in his West Hollywood home after a long battle with cancer, a family representative told The Hollywood Reporter.
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Jason amassed more than 275 acting credits on IMDb alone during his seven-decade onscreen career that began in the mid-1960s with a comedy sketch on CBS’ The Red Skelton Show, and he made his big-screen debut in Howard Hawks’ final film, Rio Lobo (1970), where his character died in the arms of John Wayne.
The Hollywood native also was an actor and production associate for Orson Welles on The Other Side of the Wind, which came out in 2018 after 48 years in development.
After working for Hill in The Driver (1978) and The Long Riders (1980), the fun-loving Jason stood out as a redneck bartender in 48 Hrs. (1982), then followed with parts in Hill’s Streets of Fire (1984), Brewster’s Millions (1985), Red Heat (1988), Johnny Handsome (1989), Wild Bill (1995) and Undisputed (2002).
For Carpenter, he was the scientist Paul Leahy in Prince of Darkness (1987) and the resistance fighter Gilbert in They Live (1988) before they reunited for Body Bags (1993), In the Mouth of Madness (1994), Village of the Damned (1995), Escape From L.A. (1996) and Ghosts of Mars (2001).
On X, Carpenter called him “one of the great character actors in cinema … he was a dear friend and I’ll miss him terribly.”
Jason also got a lot of gigs through his lifelong friendship with producer-director Frank Marshall, the spider horror film Arachnophobia (1990) among them.
He appeared as the colorful Stapleton on 33 episodes over all three seasons of David Milch’s Deadwood from 2004-06 — Hill directed the pilot, helping him land that role — then returned for the 2019 movie.
He also had a regular role as Capt. Skip Gleason on the syndicated 1997-98 series Mike Hammer, Private Eye and recurred as Uncle Jim (Louie Anderson’s brother) on the FX comedy Baskets from 2017-19.
While his father, a future P.E. teacher, was fighting in World War II, Peter Edward Ostling was born in Hollywood on July 22, 1944. He got into acting when he played Sheridan Whiteside in The Man Who Came to Dinner, the senior-year play at Newport Harbor High School.
“When I went out for my curtain call, they exploded into applause and I went, ‘Oh, I like this, I’ll be coming back for more, thank you,’” he recalled in a 2022 interview.
Jason went on to study drama at Carnegie Mellon and act in every play he could, with stops at the Paper Mill Playhouse in Milburn, New Jersey; the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco; and, as a founding member, the South Coast Repertory Company in Costa Mesa, California.
Starting out in the 1960s, he appeared on such shows as The F.B.I., Cimarron Strip, Here Come the Brides and Daniel Boone, followed by work on Gunsmoke, Land of the Giants, Kung Fu and Hawaii Five-O in the early ’70s.
When he lived in the New York area from 1969-77, Jason said he worked on some 300 commercials — he once showed his nipples in a spot for the deodorant Right Guard that ran for two years and made him “a lot of money” — and he was an excellent baritone who performed in several stage musicals.
His film résumé included The Baltimore Bullet (1980), The Long Riders (1980), Dreamscape (1984), The Karate Kid (1984), Heartbreak Ridge (1986), Alien Nation (1988), Mortal Kombat (1995), Congo (1995), The Glimmer Man (1996), Dante’s Peak (1997), Adaptation (2002), Seabiscuit (2003), Alien Apocalypse (2005), Milk (2008), Hail, Caesar! (2016) and Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018). He has several projects in the can as well.
An avid tennis player and furniture maker, he said his career prospects improved when he gave up drinking more than 40 years ago.
Survivors include his wife, Eileen (they married in 1979), and his children, Michael Andrew van Ameringen and daughter Robin Goldwasser, the singer, playwright and wife of John Flansburgh, half of the alt band They Might Be Giants.
“I always say there are only two things you need to do to be an actor,” he said in a 2019 interview. “You have to show up on time and you have to know your lines — you don’t even have to be good.”
9:42 a.m. Updated with details of death.
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