Harris Yulin
Harris Yulin is an actor, born 1937.
Harris Yulin was born Harris Bart Goldberg in Los Angeles in 1937 and worked on screen for fifty years, clocking well over a hundred film and television roles. He was almost never the subject of a film and he was constantly in them.
His instrument was institutional authority. Read the character names and a whole career appears: a judge in Ghostbusters II, the National Security Advisor in Clear and Present Danger, a general in Murder at 1600, a senator in The Emperor's Club, an admiral in Hostile Waters and again in Nikita. The two that matter most are eighteen years apart and essentially the same man behind a different desk: Bernstein, the crooked cop in Scarface, and Doug Rosselli in Training Day. Yulin specialised in the sound of a powerful person calmly deciding something ugly, and he did it without any of the usual signals, no relish, no smirk, just the flat competence of somebody handling a file.
A Primetime Emmy nomination came in 1996, for Frasier, which is a good joke on a career of grim men. The later work found more warmth than the earlier work ever allowed: Al Cross in The Place Beyond the Pines, Father Lavie in I Know This Much Is True, and best of all Buddy Dieker in Ozark, an old man with nothing left to protect and no interest in pretending otherwise. He was still working the year before he died in 2025, in Omni Loop.
Movies (44)
- Scarface (1983)
- Rush Hour 2 (2001)
- Training Day (2001)
- Bean (1997)
- Ghostbusters II (1989)
- Clear and Present Danger (1994)
- The Place Beyond the Pines (2013)
- Cutthroat Island (1995)
- Murder at 1600 (1997)
- The Hurricane (1999)
- The Believers (1987)
- Final Analysis (1992)
- American Outlaws (2001)
- Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus (2006)
- The Heart of Justice (1992)
- Multiplicity (1996)
- The Emperor's Club (2002)
- Perfume (2001)
- Night Moves (1975)
- The Family Fang (2016)
- Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer (2016)
- Omni Loop (2024)
- The Million Dollar Hotel (2000)
- Loch Ness (1996)
- Fatal Beauty (1987)
- If These Walls Could Talk (1996)
- Truman (1995)
- Bad Dreams (1988)
- Narrow Margin (1990)
- St. Ives (1976)
TV (10)
Where to start with Harris Yulin
Watch Scarface and Training Day in the same sitting. Two films, two decades apart, one performance: the official whose corruption is simply an administrative fact. Nobody did that better, and the second is almost a deliberate echo of the first.
The part to actually seek out, though, is Ozark. Buddy is the warmest thing he ever played, cantankerous, funny, entirely without sentiment, and it is the clearest evidence that the granite exterior was a choice rather than a limit.
For the early period, Night Moves is a proper 1970s detective picture and shows the young version of the same authority. Clear and Present Danger and Ghostbusters II are the studio uses of him, one serious and one very much not. The Place Beyond the Pines is the late, softened version. Looking for Richard is the curiosity, since he appears as himself and as a king.