Beau Starr, 'Goodfellas' and 'Halloween' Actor, Dies at 81
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- Beau Starr died peacefully of natural causes on Friday in Vancouver, Canada, at age 81, according to his brother Mike Starr, who called him "very unique and special" in announcing the death to TMZ.
- Born Sept. 1, 1944 in Queens, New York, Starr was a professional football player on the New York Jets' practice squad from 1966 to '68 before moving to the CFL's Montreal Alouettes and Hamilton Tiger-Cats, then transitioning to acting with a 1979 debut on the sketch show Bizarre.
- Starr built a prolific TV resume as a guest actor across TJ Hooker, Cagney & Lacey, Three's Company, Knight Rider, The A-Team, MacGyver, Moonlighting, NYPD Blue, and dozens of other series from the late 1970s through the 2000s.
- He landed two significant series-regular roles: Lt. Bill Triplett on NBC's short-lived crime drama True Blue (1989–90) and Lt. Harding Welsh on the CTV crime comedy Due South, which he starred in from 1994 to '99.
- Starr's film credits include Sheriff Ben Meeker in Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (1988) and Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers (1989), plus appearances in Fletch (1985), Goodfellas (1990), Speed (1994), Devil in a Blue Dress (1995), and Cinderella Man (2005).
Why it matters: Starr's death closes a career arc uncommon in Hollywood: a professional football player who pivoted to a 30-plus-year acting run spanning slasher sequels, Scorsese classics, and a five-season lead on Due South. His genre-hopping résumé — from Halloween's Sheriff Meeker to Goodfellas to Speed — illustrates how working character actors stitched together the texture of late-20th-century American film and TV.
