Robert Machray, Veteran Stage Actor and Fire Marshal Dobbins on ‘Cheers,’ Dies at 79 (original) (raw)

Robert Machray, who starred as Orson Welles on the stage and played Fire Marshal Dobbins on Cheers in an acting career that spanned five decades, has died. He was 79.

Machray died Sunday at his home in North Hollywood after enduring two strokes and a brief battle with dementia, his husband, Luigi Camperchioli, told The Hollywood Reporter.

He also showed up on episodes of Operation Petticoat, Three’s Company, Life Goes On, Roseanne, Sister, Sister, Suddenly Susan, Profiler, The Drew Carey Show, Girlfriends, Criminal Minds and Parks and Recreation, which in 2011 marked his final onscreen credit.

Machray portrayed Dobbins, often the victim of pranks at the bar, on four episodes of NBC’s Cheers during seasons eight, nine and 11 from 1990-93.

He appeared in the 1999-2000 Broadway revival of Amadeus that starred Michael Sheen and David Suchet and received a Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle prize in 2002 for his turn as Welles in Austin Pendleton’s Orson’s Shadow. Backstage remarked that he had “the magnificent voice, stature and acting chops to play” the legendary filmmaker.

Machray also was known for his award-winning performances as one of the mentally disabled men in Tom Griffin’s The Boys Next Door and as Pozzo in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.

He served as the artistic director of the Los Angeles-based Classical Theatre Lab in the 1990s and acted for The Old Globe, the Los Angeles Civic Light Opera, The Matrix Theater Company, South Coast Repertory, Hartford Stage and Playwrights Horizons, among many other companies.

Born in San Diego on May 4, 1945, Robert Machray Ward was raised in St. Paul, Minnesota. He studied anthropology at Yale, attended USC and made his onscreen debut in the 1977 NBC telefilm Panic in Echo Park, starring Dorian Harewood.

He appeared in the films Cutting Class (1989), A Time to Remember (1998) and The Master of Disguise (2002), handled two characters as a voice actor for the 2001 video game Star Wars: Rogue Squadron II — Rogue Leader and played a fainting Santa in a long-running series of commercials for M&Ms (he used to call it “his TV show,” Camperchioli said).