René Auberjonois, who originated the role of Father Mulcahy in Robert Altman’s MASH, starred as Clayton Endicott III on Benson and aided the Federation during the Dominion War as Constable Odo on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine has died at the age of 79.
Auberjonois’ father was a journalist and his mother a painter. Look back on his family line far enough and you’ll find that his Great-Great-Great Grandmother was Napoleon’s (yes, that Napoleon’s) youngest sister. His break on Broadway came in 1968, playing the Fool opposite Lee J. Cobb in King Lear. He won the Tony in 1969 appearing with Katherine Hepburn in André Previn and Alan Jay Lerner’s musical Coco.
The following year he co-starred in Altman’s MASH and worked with the maverick director again on Brewster McCloud, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Images and, briefly, The Player. In Brewster McCloud he plays an ornithologist who transforms into a bird. Altman flew Auberjonois down from New York to Houston on a Sunday night, they created the character and shot his sequences on a Monday and he was back in New York by Tuesday for that night’s stage performance.
More recently he was seen as a regular on Boston Legal (alongside Star Trek legend William Shatner) and in Kelly Reichardt’s Certain Women, and will appear next year in her film First Cow.
Auberjonois has hundreds of credits from television guest shots, but it’s the one-two punch of Benson and Deep Space Nine that gives him the most notoriety. Clayton Endicott III, the snobbish Chief of Staff to the Governor of California, came to the show in the second season, locking horns with the rest of the gang from 1980 to 1986. In a weird twist, Benson’s cast also includes Ethan Phillips as Pete Downey, who later played Neelix on seven season of Star Trek: Voyager. Further weirdness:
From 1993 through 1999, however, is where Auberjonois slapped on the face-smoothening makeup to become Odo, the mysterious Chief of Security on Deep Space Nine, the most rich and nuanced of all the Star Trek series.
Odo, like Spock and Data before him, and Seven of Nine and T’Pol after, was the outsider on the show and, by extension, the character that usually worked as a stand-in for an engaged fan. Not to deal too much in stereotypes, but I can say with some assurance that there is a degree of truth to the notion of Trekkies sometimes being a bit of a square peg in society’s round hole. Someone who has trouble fitting in is going to be a natural favorite for this group.
Auberjonois took to Odo’s lore quite well, and when fans approached him for autographs he was keen to include a little cartoon of Odo’s bucket. (For those of you who don’t know, Odo was from a species called the Founders, who were shapeshifters. At the end of each day, to regenerate, he would revert to his original form, which was a a big mass of goo. Thus, he slept in a bucket. It’s Star Trek!) Proceeds from the Odo bucket drawings went to Doctors Without Borders, an organization for which he raised money for years.
I have written about the passings of many celebrities in my career, but this is the first time I’ve written about somebody I knew.