James Sloyan, the busy character actor who appeared in films including The Sting and Xanadu and played Madeline Kahn’s husband on her short-lived 1980s ABC sitcom, has died. He was 85.
Sloyan died July 22 at his home in Sherman Oaks, his family announced over the weekend.
Star Trek fans know him for his five appearances as a member of four species across The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine and Voyager in the 1990s, and he served as the voice of Toyota’s luxury brand Lexus in commercials for 18 years starting in 1989.
In George Roy Hill’s The Sting (1973), winner of the Oscar for best picture, Sloyan helped set the plot in motion with his turn as Mottola, the numbers runner who works for racketeer Doyle Lonnegan (Robert Shaw) and falls victim to a “pigeon drop scam” perpetrated by Johnny Hooker (Robert Redford) and Luther Coleman (Robert Earl Jones).
And in the Olivia Newton-John musical fantasy Xanadu (1980), he played Simpson, the tyrannical boss of Michael Beck’s artist Sonny Malone at AirFlow Records.
Sloyan landed the role of Kahn’s husband, a guy who writes steamy romance novels under the pen name Crystal Love, but the 1983-84 show — the first produced by Carsey-Werner Productions — lasted just 18 episodes.
The youngest of four kids, James Joseph Sloyan was born in Indianapolis on Feb. 24, 1941. His father, James Sr., was a construction engineer. When he was 4, he “discovered the delights of the Indianapolis State Fair, wrangling an appearance with [Western movie actor] Lash LaRue and his traveling Western Show,” his family said.
After spending time living overseas and in Albany, New York, Sloyan graduated from the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York and served three years in the U.S. Army before returning to New York, where he acted and was a choreographer for fight scenes for Joseph Papp’s New York Shakespeare Festival. (On X, Henry Winkler noted he was one of his sword fight instructors at drama school.)
He made it to Broadway in Arthur Kopit’s Indians in 1969, had the lead in such off-Broadway productions as Irv Bauer’s A Dream Out of Time and made his onscreen debut in the 1970 film The Traveling Executioner, starring Stacy Keach.
Sloyan, who moved to California in 1973, appeared in The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight (1971) and on episodes of The Doctors, The Streets of San Francisco, Kojak and Delvecchio before landing a regular role on the 1977 ABC drama Westside Medical.
He played a Romulan admiral and then the son of the Klingon Worf (Michael Dorn) on Next Generation, the Bajoran scientist Dr. Mora on Deep Space Nine and the Haakonian scientist Ma’bor Jetrel on Voyager.
His TV résumé also included the telefilms The Disappearance of Aimee, starring Faye Dunaway and Bette Davis, and The Billionaires Boys Club and stops on Wonder Woman, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, Lou Grant, Falcon Crest, Knots Landing, Cagney & Lacey, Moonlighting, Murder, She Wrote, Quantum Leap, The X-Files and NYPD Blue.
“Friends and colleagues remember him always present, always curious, courageous, inventive and loyal as well as brash, mouthy and very urban. He was one-of-a-kind,” his family said.
Survivors include his wife, actress Deirdre Lenihan (Needles and Pins, The Waltons), whom he married in 1973, and their children, Daniel, a musician, and Samantha Sloyan, an actress (The Life of Chuck, Dr. Penelope Blake on Grey’s Anatomy).
His brother, author and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Patrick Sloyan, died in February 2019.