John Heard, a film and TV actor best known for his iconic role as dad Peter McCallister in the first two Home Alone movies and an Emmy-nominated role on The Sopranos, died Friday. He was 72. The Santa Clara County coroner’s office confirmed Heard’s death to Deadline. The cause is under investigation.
Heard has acted in nearly 200 projects, one of those being the role of Ace Morgan in the 2008 DC animated film Justice League: The New Frontier.
The Washington, D.C., native’s acting career began in the mid-1970s in an off-Broadway production of Mark Medoff’s play The Wager. He then segued to television, playing the role of Arthur Dimmesdale in a production of The Scarlet Letter.
He mainly turned to film in the 1980s, going on to land several leading roles in features including Chilly Scenes of Winter, Heart Beat, Cutter’s Way, Cat People, and C.H.U.D., as well as supporting roles in After Hours, Big, Beaches, Awakenings, Rambling Rose, The Pelican Brief, My Fellow Americans, Snake Eyes and Animal Factory. But he is perhaps best remembered as Macauley Culkin’s dad in the 1990’s Home Alone, which grossed nearly a half-billion dollars worldwide and was the No. 1 film of the year domestically, and 1992’s Home Alone 2: Lost in New York, which banked $358M globally and was No. 2 behind Aladdin that year.
He received an Emmy nomination in 1999 for a guest starring role on The Sopranos as Vin Makazian, a corrupt New Jersey detective with a penchant for hookers and gambling who did favors for Tony Soprano. He also earned a CableACE nomination for the 1985 miniseries Tender Is the Night, played the series-regular role of Roy Foltrigg in 1990s drama The Client and appeared in the original Sharknado in 2013. He had numerous key recurring/guest roles in series including CSI: Miami, the original Prison Break, Entourage, CSI and more recently Elementary, MacGyver, APB and Modern Family. He was most recently seen in a guest role in an April episode of The Outsiders.
RIP John Heard
