Peter Donat
Peter Donat is an actor, born 1928.
Casting directors had a very particular use for Peter Donat, and the character list gives it away immediately: Headmaster Bartram, Colonel Mathis, Arthur St. Clair, Clair Montrose, executives, lawyers, board members, fathers. He played the institution, in a good suit, speaking carefully and rarely raising his voice.
He came out of the theatre and never entirely left it. Born in Nova Scotia in 1928, he was a co-founding company member of the American Conservatory Theater and a frequent player at the Stratford Festival, and he won a Theatre World Award for The First Gentleman in 1957. The screen work fitted around that: The Hindenburg, F.I.S.T., The China Syndrome, Tucker: The Man and His Dream, The War of the Roses, School Ties, Red Corner, The Game. Almost always a supporting role, almost always the man with the authority to say no.
Television supplied the two parts people remember. Elmo Tyson on the primetime soap Flamingo Road across 1981 and 1982, and then, from 1995, William Mulder on The X-Files: the father of Fox Mulder, a handful of appearances built entirely on a man who knows a great deal more than he is prepared to say. It is a small role that carries an enormous amount of a very long-running show's mythology, and he plays it with exactly the right amount of held-back regret.
He was nominated for a Genie for The Bay Boy in 1984, a film not among the credits listed here. He died in 2018.
Movies (14)
- School Ties (1992)
- The Game (1997)
- The War of the Roses (1989)
- Red Corner (1997)
- The China Syndrome (1979)
- F.I.S.T. (1978)
- Tucker: The Man and His Dream (1988)
- Skin Deep (1989)
- The Hindenburg (1975)
- Mazes and Monsters (1982)
- The Deep End (2001)
- The Babe (1992)
- Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains (1982)
- The Flying Misfits (1976)
TV (10)
Where to start with Peter Donat
Go to The X-Files first, because the obvious answer happens to be correct here. He appears rarely, and every appearance is load-bearing.
For the films, The Game is the best showcase of what he does with a small part in a big machine, and The China Syndrome is the strongest picture he is in, a thriller that has aged frighteningly well.
School Ties and Tucker: The Man and His Dream are the two purest examples of the type: institutional authority, played straight, given more inner life than the script strictly requires.
The War of the Roses is the funniest thing on the list. The Hindenburg is the 1970s disaster-movie curiosity, and Mazes and Monsters is a genuine period oddity, worth an hour if you have any interest in how moral panics get dramatised.