James B. Sikking, who starred as a hardened police lieutenant on Hill Street Blues and as the titular character's kindhearted dad on Doogie Howser, M.D.,has died at 90.
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Sikking died of complications from dementia, his publicist Cynthia Snyder said in a statement on Sunday.
Born the youngest of five children on March 5, 1934 in Los Angeles, his early acting ventures included an uncredited part in Roger Corman's Five Guns West and a bit role in an episode of Perry Mason.
He also secured guest spots in a litany of popular 1970s television series, from the action-packed Mission: Impossible, M.A.S.H., The F.B.I.,The Rockford Files, Hawaii Five-O and"Charlie's Angels to Eight is Enough and Little House on the Prairie.
"Hill Street Blues" would debut in 1981, a fresh take on the traditional police procedural. Sikking played Lt. Howard Hunter, a clean-cut Vietnam War veteran who headed the Emergency Action Team of the Metropolitan Police Department in a never-named city.
The acclaimed show was a drama, but Sikking's character's uptight nature and quirks were often used to comic effect. Sikking based his performance on a drill instructor he'd had at basic training when military service cut through his time at the University of California, Los Angeles, from which he graduated in 1959.
"The drill instructor looked like he had steel for hair and his uniform had so much starch in it, you knew it would sit in the corner when he took it off in the barracks," he told The Fresno Bee in 2014, when he did a series of interviews with various publications marking the box set's release.
The show ultimately ran until 1987, although for a brief moment it wasn't clear Sikking would make it that far. A December 1983 episode ended with his character contemplating dying by suicide. The cliffhanger drew comparisons to the "Who shot J.R.?" mystery from Dallas not long before - although it was quickly resolved when TV supplements accidentally ran a teaser summary that made it clear Hunter had been saved.
Sikking would earn an Emmy nomination for outstanding supporting actor in a drama in 1984. The look and format of Hill Street Blues were something new to Sikking - and many in the audience, from the grimy look of the set to the multiple storylines that often kept actors working in the background, even when they didn't have lines in the scene.
After the end of "Hill Street Blues," he acted in nearly 100 episodes of Dougie Howser, M.D., reuniting with Steven Bochco, who co-created both Hill Street Blues and the Neil Patrick Harris-starring sitcom.
He married Florine Caplan, with whom he had two children and four grandchildren.
Australian Associated Press
