Nicholas Pryor, the busy character actor who portrayed Tom Cruise’s father in Risky Business and Kathleen Robertson’s dad on Beverly Hills, 90210 during a career that spanned seven decades, has died. He was 89.
Pryor died Monday of cancer at his home in Wilmington, North Carolina, his wife, actress Christine Belford, told The Hollywood Reporter.
In a note to be delivered to THR after his death, he wrote: “Nicholas Pryor was enormously grateful to have been, for nearly 70 years, a working actor.”
From 1997-2002, Pryor played the former spy Victor Collins on the General Hospital spinoff Port Charles, culminating a long career in daytime soap operas that included stints on The Secret Storm, The Edge of Night, Love Is a Many Splendored Thing, All My Children and Another World.
Pryor recurred on Fox’s Beverly Hills, 90210 as A. Milton Arnold, the chancellor of California University and father of Robertson’s Claire Arnold, from 1994-97. And he was the father of Paula Devicq’s character, Kirsten Bennett, on another Fox series, Party of Five.
Earlier, he played vice principal Jack Feldspar on the 1987-88 NBC drama The Bronx Zoo, created by Gary David Goldberg and starring Edward Asner.
On the big screen, Pryor was Barbara Feldon’s hapless husband in Michael Ritchie’s Smile (1975); the pipe-smoking college professor who rides with Michael Sarrazin in an AC Cobra in Charles Bail‘s The Gumball Rally (1976); the museum director who meets his end in a train yard in Damien: Omen II (1978); and the father of Robert Downey Jr.’s drug-addled Julian in Less Than Zero (1987).
Nicholas David Probst was born in Baltimore on Jan. 28, 1935. His father, Stanley, worked in the pharmaceutical industry.
While attending the all-boys Gilman School in Baltimore and Yale University, Pryor honed his acting skills on the stage with the Drummond Players in Baltimore, the Camden Hills Theatre in Maine, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and the Star Theatre in Minneapolis.
After graduating from college in 1956, the lanky Pryor appeared in four Broadway plays in 1957-59: with Karl Malden in The Egghead, with Joan Bennett in Love Me a Little, with Leon Ames in Howie and with Diana Douglas in The Highest Tree. The four, however, lasted a total of 56 performances.
Nicholas Pryor (right) and William Holden in 1978’s ‘Damien: Omen II.’
20th Century Fox Film Corp./Courtesy Everett Collection
He made his first soap appearances in 1958 in The Brighter Day and in 1959 in Young Dr. Malone. In 1964, he joined NBC’s Another World as an original castmember, but his character, Tom Baxter, was killed off six months later. He then was hired on a primetime soap, CBS’ The Nurses.
Pryor was top-billed as a man in the midst of a midlife crisis in his movie debut, The Way We Live Now (1970), and he followed that with turns in Man on a Swing (1974), The Happy Hooker (1975), The Fish That Saved Pittsburgh (1979) and Airplane! (1980).
He returned to Broadway in the ’70s with replacement roles in That Championship Season and Thieves.
In addition to having his Porsche 928 wrecked by Cruise’s Joel Goodsen in Risky Business (1983), Pryor also showed up in The Falcon and the Snowman (1985), Morgan Stewart’s Coming Home (1987), Pacific Heights (1990), Hoffa (1992), Sliver (1993), Hail Caesar (1994), The Chamber (1996), Molly (1999), Collateral Damage (2002), The List (2007), The Hunger Games: Mockingjay — Part 1 (2014), Doctor Sleep (2019) and Halloween Kills (2021).
And with more than 170 acting credits on IMDb, he was seen on TV in dozens of shows, from Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Eight Is Enough, M*A*S*H and Little House on the Prairie to Dallas, St. Elsewhere, L.A. Law, The West Wing and NYPD Blue, and in the miniseries The Adams Chronicles, Washington: Behind Closed Doors and East of Eden.
He and Belford, his fourth wife, were married in July 1993, and they worked together on Beverly Hills, 90210. He also is survived by his daughter, Stacey, and his grandchildren, Auguste and Avril.
