Known for his performances in theater, television and films, the English actor made his home in Virginia
Paxton Whitehead, a comic actor who earned a Tony nomination for his role in a revival of “Camelot” and played the starchiest of stuffed shirts in films like the Rodney Dangerfield comedy “Back to School” and on hit 1990s sitcoms like “Friends” and “Mad About You,” died June 16 in Arlington, Va. He was 85.
Jack O’Brien, who served as the Old Globe’s artistic director from 1981 to 2007, said he and Whitehead first met and became friends in the 1970s, when Whitehead was serving as the artistic director of the Shaw Festival in Ontario, Canada. They shared a close circle of acting friends, including Nicholas Martin and O’Brien’s mentor, Ellis Rabb.
Whitehead was known for his modulated baritone voice, which he told the San Diego Union in 1986 was how he cracked open every character he played. You always have to find the core of humor in a character — at least I like to, the same way some people will say, ‘I like to find the good in him, even though he is a villain,’” he told The Los Angeles Times in 1997.
That same year, he immortalized on film the comic character of Philip Barbay, the uptight dean of a business school and the nemesis of Thornton Melon, Dangerfield’s character, in “Back to School.” Melon, a crass but successful businessperson, comes to Grand Lakes University to visit his struggling son and winds up enrolling at the school after making a sizable donation.
Francis Edward Paxton Whitehead was born in England, on Oct. 17, 1937. His father, Charles, was a lawyer, and his mother, Louise Whitehead, was a homemaker. His daughter said that his family and friends had called him Paxton since he was a child.
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