“Didn’t that guy ever have hair?” So said time traveler Marty McFly upon encountering his 1985 high school principal, Mr. Strickland, 30 years in the past in Back to the Future. Well, as the above picture of Strickland’s portrayer, James Tolkan, making his TV debut in a 1960 Naked City episode demonstrates, the answer was indeed “not really.” That failed to stop him from having a more than five-decade career on the stage, on TV, and in the movies. The veteran character actor passed away last week at his home in upstate New York at 94.
A native “yooper,” Tolkan was born in Calumet on Michigan’s upper peninsula in 1931. Eventually moving to Arizona, James briefly attended Eastern Arizona College on a football scholarship before enlisting in the Navy during the Korean War. After a heart condition led to his discharge from the service, he would eventually graduate from the University of Iowa with a BA in Drama. Tolkan migrated to New York and studied under Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio. Six years after his Naked City turn, James’ Broadway shot came when he replaced Robert Duvall, whom he had been understudying, as Harry Roat, Jr. in the original run of Wait Until Dark. He later was part of the original cast of David Mamet’s 1984 drama Glengarry Glen Ross.
Tolkan’s movie debut was in a 1966 filming of Chekhov’s Three Sisters, starring Geraldine Page, Kim Stanley, and Shelley Winters. Through the early ’70s he had minor roles They Might Be Giants, The Friends of Eddie Coyle, and, yes, The Werewolf of Washington. James was one of Al Pacino’s NYPD accusers in Sidney Lumet’s 1973 biodrama actioner Serpico, and Woody Allen cast him as Napoleon Bonaparte in the filmmaker’s Russian Lit sendup Love and Death two years later. He got to play medical examiners in pair of horror outings, The Amityville Horror (1979) and Wolfen (1981), and also in ’81 was a D.A. in Prince of the City, the second of his three pictures with Lumet. A second pairing with Pacino came in the 1982 comedy Author! Author!
’80s audiences saw James as an FBI agent in WarGames and the New York City deputy mayor in Turk 182! before he landed the role most moviegoers associate him with, the stern principal of Hill Valley High who has no patience with “slackers,” in 1985’s Back to the Future. Tolkan reprised the role in 1989’s Back to the Future Part II and played Strickland’s Old West grandfather in Back the Future Part III the following year. His ’50s Navy experience served him as Commander “Stinger” Jardian, who berates hotshot flyboy Pete “Maverick” Mitchell (Tom Cruise) in 1986’s Top Gun. He was a police detective who winds up in the land of Eternia, helping He-Man battle the sinister Skeletor, in the 1987 fantasy/action tale Masters of the Universe. And Tolkan and Lumet worked together once more in the generational crime tale Family Business in 1989.
James was mobster accountant Numbers in 1990’s Dick Tracy, directed by and starring his old Actor’s Studio classmate Warren Beatty, and in 1993 he played a Treasury agent in Boiling Point, starring Wesley Snipes. On the small screen Tolkan guest-starred in such shows as Hill Street Blues, Miami Vice, The Equalizer, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, and The Wonder Years. He had recurring roles on Mary Tyler Moore’s short-lived 1985 sitcom Mary and the syndicated 1993 action series Cobra, and was part of the ensemble cast of the 2001 mystery/drama Nero Wolfe, starring Maury Chaykin and Turk 182!’s Timothy Hutton.
Continuing to work in TV and film well into his eighties, Tolkan had his final movie turn in the offbeat western/horror tale Bone Tomahawk in 2015. A frequent guest at fan conventions (where fans eagerly waited to have him call them “slackers”), James lived in semi-retirement with his wife Parmalee, who he met while working on an off-Broadway play together in 1971.