Actor Jon Cypher – immediately recognizable for many of us as Man at Arms in 1987’s Masters of the Universe – has died.
He passed away at his home in Central Point, Oregon, with his wife of nearly 40 years, Carol Rosin, by his side.
But Cypher’s career was so much longer and stranger and richer than any single role could suggest – and for those of us who grew up with classic television, it’s worth pausing on just how far back that career reached.
He was there, essentially, at the birth of the TV event. In 1957, a twenty-five-year-old Jon Cypher stood opposite Julie Andrews as Prince Christopher in the very first television broadcast of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella – a live CBS special watched by more than 100 million Americans, a staggering number that’s easy to forget in an era of on-demand everything. It was a role that could have defined a career on its own, and for a lot of viewers of a certain generation, it did: he was always, a little bit, Prince Charming.
But Cypher didn’t coast on that. He built a genuine stage career too, debuting on Broadway in 1959’s The Disenchantedand going on to appear in 1776, The Great White Hope, Coco, and Man of La Mancha – where he eventually stepped into the title role of Don Quixote himself. That felt fitting. He trained as an opera singer, sang in four languages, and by his wife’s account, saw something of himself in Quixote’s windmills: the enemies you fight on the way to something worth reaching for.
Blues, Brigadier and Batman
Television audiences of the 1980s and 90s knew him differently, though just as well. As Chief Fletcher Daniels on Hill Street Blues, he spent all seven seasons as the show’s bureaucratic thorn in Captain Furillo’s side – more interested in budgets and politics than doing right, and all the better a character for it. Then came a hard swerve into comedy as Brigadier General Marcus Craig on Major Dad, sparring gamely with Gerald McRaney for three seasons. In between and around those, there was practically everything: Dynasty, Knots Landing, Law & Order, Knight Rider, Murder, She Wrote, RoboCop, JAG – and, for a generation raised on Saturday morning cartoons, his voice as Spellbinder in Batman Beyond. On the big screen, he faced off against Burt Lancaster in Valdez Is Coming and pulled on the armor of Man-At-Arms alongside Dolph Lundgren in the wonderfully hated/beloved Masters of the Universe.
In 2014 he said acting is “not an easy profession. You’re always being judged, by critics, by the audience”.
His advice for young actors was simple: “Gird your loins very sturdily and have a sharp sword, because you have to pick yourself up many, many, many times.”
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But acting didn’t define him. He also wrote a book of limericks, If You’re Not Depressed You Oughta Be in Therapy, in 2019,
His obituary describes a man of great kindness and humor, with a wide, caring regard for life in general.
He’ll be laid to rest at the Forest Conservation Burial Ground near Ashland, Oregon, wrapped simply in a biodegradable shroud beneath the trees. A return to nature, as his wife put it, that he’d asked for himself.
Don’t say goodbye – say good journey.