Edward Herrmann is on my list of litmus test actors. As in, you can tell a lot about a person by which of his movies you think of first. Or TV shows; maybe you think of him in Gilmore Girls. Still, his career goes back to a Sophia Loren movie I’ve never heard of called La Mortadella in 1971, where he’s uncredited, and goes through a 2016 episode of American Dad! Impressive, since he died in 2014. He also did a lot of voicework, most notably for PBS. If you watched much Nova, among others, you heard his mellow tones. And he did a fine performance in an episode of M*A*S*H, which admittedly isn’t the most unusual credit, but it’s still worth noting.
Herrmann got started on the stage, as so many do. Appropriately enough for some of the characters he’d go on to play, he himself grew up in Grosse Pointe, Michigan. He made a career playing WASP types, often upper-class. In fact, he would become extremely famous for playing Franklin Roosevelt, surely the most upper-class WASP President the US ever had. (Though of course the Roosevelts were Dutch in origin and the Delanos were French.) Herrmann himself was apparently a Unitarian turned Catholic, but living in Grosse Pointe would give you a lot of exposure to upper-class WASPs.
I will always remember him for two roles in particular. First, unusually, is Reverend Michael Hill of The North Avenue Irregulars. He’s a widowed young Presbyterian minister with two children who starts at the eponymous North Avenue Presbyterian Church only to discover that the city he’s in is full of illegal gambling. He’s recruited by the Treasury Department to help bust the mob in town. No local men will help, so he gathers a group of women. It’s an underrated gem that, of course, is not available on Disney+.
However, as a woman of my generation, of course I remember him as Max of The Lost Boys. He’s charming and genial and kindly, until he’s not. The title he’s generally referred to is a spoiler, but it’s how my friends and I, at least, have referred to him for decades. I can’t even talk about how great his performance is without giving away the ending, because the atmosphere he manages to project is one that reveals the secret. I grant you that we’re talking about a silly vampire movie from 1987, but if you somehow haven’t seen it yet, you’ll miss a great treat by finding out about that performance from me and not him.
And, yes, there’s the PBS. And the History Channel. His last performance was a voiceover for Ken Burns. And while it was his last, it certainly wasn’t his first. You could learn about most of US history just by things he narrated. He ended on cancer, and of course there’s the FDR thing, but you could learn about the American Revolution, the War of 1812, the US states and Presidents, the Fifties, and on and on. He also narrated things about the Loch Ness Monster, Antarctica, and Stalin, among others not American. He also played various historical figures in live action drama, if that’s more your speed. Edward Herrmann, fine actor and history teacher, it seems.