James Tolkan died Thursday in Saranac Lake, New York. He was 94.
The announcement came from his family and from the official Back to the Future website, where the franchise he helped define posted his obituary and asked fans to donate to their local animal shelter in his memory.
No cause of death was given. He passed peacefully.
For the vast majority of people who know his name, James Tolkan is Mr. Strickland. The scowling, unrelenting Hill Valley High School vice principal who called Marty McFly, his father, and Biff Tannen “slackers” with equal contempt.
Who looked at every teenager within shouting distance like they were already one bad decision away from ruin. Who showed up in all three Back to the Future films, as Mr. Strickland in 1985 and 1989, then as his own ancestor Marshal James Strickland in the third film’s Wild West timeline.
For years after, fans would approach him in public and ask him to call them slackers. He always did.
But Tolkan’s actual career was 55 years wide and contained more than most people who search his name today will know.
He was a New York theater actor first, and a movie star second, and the story of how he became both is worth telling.
Who Was James Tolkan?
James Stewart Tolkan was born June 20, 1931, in Calumet, Michigan. His parents divorced when he was young and he moved through Chicago before ending up in Tucson, Arizona, where he graduated from Amphitheater High School in 1949 and played on the football team.
He attended Eastern Arizona College on a football scholarship before leaving to join the United States Navy during the Korean War, serving aboard the USS Sandoval.
After the service, he studied at three different colleges and then made a decision. He got on a bus to New York City with $75 in his pocket.
He landed in a cold water flat where the rent matched his VA check.
He worked on the docks during the day and studied acting at night, under Stella Adler and Lee Strasberg at The Actors Studio, two of the most influential acting teachers in American theater history.
He never stopped thinking of himself as a New York stage actor. “I’m really just a New York actor. I’m a stage actor,” he told Media Mikes later in his career. “And I said I was never going to Hollywood until Hollywood sends for me.”
He spent 25 years working in New York theater before that call came.
The Stage Career That Built Everything
Tolkan appeared in nine Broadway productions. The most significant, and the one that tends to get overlooked in obituaries focused on his film work, was his role in the original Broadway production of David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross in 1984 and 1985, where he played the salesman Dave Moss.
The original cast also included Robert Prosky, Joe Mantegna, and James Sikking. Mamet won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for that play. Tolkan was in it from the beginning.
His first television credit came in 1960 for an episode of Naked City on ABC.
Through the 1960s and 1970s he built an extensive stage and television résumé working primarily out of New York, with film work beginning to accumulate alongside it.
The Films Before Back to the Future
By the time Robert Zemeckis cast him in Back to the Future in 1984, Tolkan had already worked with some of the most respected directors in Hollywood, mostly playing authority figures with an edge of menace or moral weight.
He worked with Sidney Lumet three times. He played a cop in Serpico in 1973, appeared in Prince of the City in 1981, and returned for Family Business in 1989.
Lumet was one of the defining American directors of the era, Dog Day Afternoon, Network, 12 Angry Men, and Tolkan worked with him repeatedly.
He was in Woody Allen’s Love and Death in 1975, where he played dual roles as Napoleon and his look-alike. He played an FBI agent in WarGames in 1983, the Matthew Broderick film about a teenager who accidentally nearly starts a nuclear war.
He appeared in The Amityville Horror in 1979. He was in Dick Tracy in 1990 as Numbers, the crooked accountant working for mob boss Big Boy Caprice, played by Al Pacino.
His first film credit was The Friends of Eddie Coyle in 1973, a Peter Yates crime thriller starring Robert Mitchum that is still considered one of the best American crime films of the 1970s.
“Nobody knew who Robert Zemeckis was back then,” Tolkan told Media Mikes about the Back to the Future casting call. “But I said ‘ok’ because this was my chance to go to Hollywood. So after a year on Broadway I went to Hollywood and did the movie. I stayed in California and did some television series.”
Mr. Strickland And Commander Stinger
The two roles that made him a fixture in the memory of anyone who grew up watching films in the 1980s arrived back to back. Back to the Future in 1985, Top Gun in 1986.
Mr. Strickland, full name Gerald Strickland, is the Hill Valley High School vice principal who views every student as a future failure. His line deliveries were clipped, disgusted, absolute.
“You’ve got a real attitude problem, McFly. You’re a slacker.” He reprised the role in Back to the Future Part II in 1989, where his character gets machine-gunned by gang members in a dystopian 1985 and still gets the last word.
In Part III in 1990, he played Marshal James Strickland, the character’s Old West ancestor, who is somehow just as stern in a different century.
“When we did the second and third movie we had huge trailers and it was unbelievable,” he told Impulse Gamer. “That’s what I remember, the fun of it. It’s the most fun I’ve ever had doing a movie.”
Commander Tom “Stinger” Jardian in Top Gun is a different kind of authority, military rather than academic, but the same quality of unforgiving competence.
Tolkan’s scene early in the film where he dresses down Tom Cruise’s Maverick and Anthony Edwards’s Goose after their unauthorized flyby of the carrier became one of the film’s most quoted exchanges.
“Your ego is writing checks your body can’t cash.” He later briefs the Top Gun graduates on their first real mission, shifting from antagonist to figure of trust without the film having to do much work to earn it. Tolkan did that in a few lines.
A Legendary Career
He worked steadily through the 1990s and 2000s in television. He was a recurring character on A Nero Wolfe Mystery, the A&E series, appearing in 21 installments and directing two episodes himself.
He guest-starred on The Wonder Years, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Miami Vice, Leverage, The Pretender, and dozens of other shows.
His last screen credit was the 2015 Western horror film Bone Tomahawk, directed by S. Craig Zahler.
He is survived by his wife of 54 years, Parmelee, whom he met in 1971 when she was working as a prop girl on the off-Broadway play Pinkville, in which he was acting.
They married that same year in Lake Placid. They had no children. His family noted he adored animals, and asked that memorial donations go to a local animal shelter, animal rescue organization, or Humane Society chapter.
Writer-producer Bob Gale, who co-wrote the Back to the Future trilogy with Robert Zemeckis, announced his death on the franchise’s official website.
Tolkan’s representative John Alcantar confirmed it to USA Today, “James was a beloved professional who lived a good, full life.”
He was 94. He got on a bus to New York with $75 and spent the next five and a half decades making himself impossible to forget.
