Charles Cioffi Dead: ‘Klute’, ‘Shaft’, ‘All The Right Moves’ Actor Was 90
Charles Cioffi, a prolific character actor in TV, film and the Broadway stage perhaps best known for memorable turns as Tom Cruise’s blue-collar dad in All The Right Moves and a sadistic killer stalking Jane Fonda in Klute, died of natural causes on Friday, May 22, at his home in Marina del Rey, California. He was 90.
His death was announced by family, and first reported by TMZ.
Born in New York City on October 31, 1935, Cioffi launched his show business career on the stage of the the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis in the early 1960s. He’d make his Broadway debut later that decade in a 1968 production of King Lear starring Lee J. Cobb. In all, he’d perform in seven Broadway productions, including the original 1969 production of 1776, a 1975 production of Hamlet with Sam Waterston in the title role and Jane Alexander as Gertrude, and, in his final Broadway credit, the 1992 two-hander Chinese Coffee with Al Pacino.
He began a busy, decades-long career in television with a role on the 1969 CBS soap Where the Heart Is and, in 1971, found an early signature role as Lt. Vic Androzzi in Shaft.
Jane Fonda and Charles Cioffi in ‘Klute’ (1971)
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer/Getty Images
That same year, in what was his film debut, he appeared in the hit thriller Klute, starring Fonda as New York City prostitute Bree Daniels and Donald Sutherland as the amateur sleuth John Klute investigating the disappearance of a businessman who also might have been one of Bree’s clients. Cioffi played an executive at the company where the missing man worked, hiring Klute to trail Fonda’s character and solve what appears to be a murder. In the film’s climactic scene, Cioffi’s character, revealed as the killer, attempts to murder Bree before dying by suicide in a dramatic plunge from a skyscraper. (In one haunting scene, Cioffi sits in his penthouse New York office, with the World Trade Center towers being constructed just outside his window).
Numerous TV roles followed, including episodes of Bonanza, The Bold Ones, The FBI, a recurring role on Get Christie Love!, Cannon, Medical Center, Kojak, Wonder Woman, The Six Million Dollar Man, Little House on the Prairie, Hawaii Five-0, the daytime soaps Ryan’s Hope, Days of Our Lives, All My Children and Another World, Lou Grant, Taxi, St. Elsewhere, The Equalizer, Thirtysomething, The X-Files, Law & Order and The Practice, among others.
Other film credits include 1979’s Time After Time, 1982’s Missing and 1992’s Newsies.
Cioffi is survived by wife Anne, two sons and other extended family, according to TMZ.
