William Christopher, best known as the earnest, soft-spoken US Army priest Father Francis Mulcahy on the hit TV comedy M*A*S*H, has died at the age of 84.
Christopher died on Saturday at his home in Pasadena, California. The actor's wife of nearly 60 years, Barbara Christopher, was with him at the time, his New York-based agent, Robert Malcolm, told Reuters.
Christopher landed his signature role on M*A*S*H after another actor played the part on the show's pilot episode. He went on to portray the soft-spoken priest assigned to the fictional 4077th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital for the duration of the series, which ran from 1972 to 1983 on the CBS network and continued to air in syndication for decades after.
Together with Alan Alda as Captain "Hawkeye" Pierce, Loretta Swit as Major Margaret "Hotlips" Houlihan and Jamie Farr as cross-dressing Corporal Maxwell Klinger, Christopher was among the only cast members to remain on the show for all 11 seasons.
Its 1983 finale drew 106 million viewers, making it the most-watched US TV show to date.
In his portrayal of Father Mulcahy, a character originated in the 1970 film that inspired TV's M*A*S*H, Christopher was a supporting player, but his role grew as the series went on.
After producers of the show decided to replace George Morgan, the actor originally cast as the chaplain, Christopher got a chance to audition for the part. Although he irked producers by ad-libbing lines in his tryout, he impressed them with his quirky performance, and they offered him the job, provided he followed the script.
As portrayed by Christopher, Mulcahy was a mild-mannered, sometimes timid presence amid the chaos of "meatball surgery" on troops wounded in the 1950-53 Korean War. The character resisted offering a religious hard-sell to the hard-boiled Army medical personnel and the wounded patients.
The Mulcahy character was Roman Catholic (Christopher actually was Methodist) but ministered to all faiths. Mulcahy affectionately referred to Hawkeye as "that crazy agnostic." In one episode, Alda's character instructs Mulcahy by radio how to perform an emergency tracheotomy on a wounded soldier under enemy fire.
"I liked the character. I liked Father Mulcahy. The character is pretty real to me," Christopher told the Fayetteville Observer newspaper in North Carolina in 2011.
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