Sam A. Mowry, a beloved Portland actor and director known both for his personal gentleness and generosity and for his deep, profoundly captivating onstage speaking voice, died on Saturday morning, July 20, 2024, at Kaiser Sunnyside Medical Center in Clackamas. He suffered massive cardiac arrest while being prepared to undergo emergency surgery for severe blockages in his arteries. He was 64.

“For those who do not know, my beloved Sam died this morning. His heart gave out,” Cindy McGean, his wife and theatrical partner, announced on Facebook. “Find each other and share stories and hugs and maybe a glass of whiskey or some bacon. I am heartbroken.”

Mowry was born in Pittsburgh, Pa., and moved to Portland in 1979, where he quickly established himself as a rising young star and eventually as a leading figure in the city’s theater scene both onstage and behind the scenes, lending a guiding hand to the late Heart Theatre and several other theater companies. In 2001 he added radio drama to his theatrical projects as one of the founders and director of Willamette Radio Workshop.

Over the years onstage he played roles as diverse as Bertram in All’s Well That Ends Well, Petruchio in The Taming of the Shrew, King Lear, a Willie Award-winning performance as Clark in Miguel Pinero’s prison drama Short Eyes, the teacher of deaf students in Mark Medoff’s Children of a Lesser God, a nefarious Professor Moriarty in a musical version of Sherlock Holmes, and even a couple of imposing theatrical lions: Shere Khan in The Jungle Book and the lion/god Aslan in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.

Mowry was an actor of impressive range and subtlety, but his deep and agile voice was his calling card. It provided him a career as an active voice actor, doing roles in, among other things, video games such as League of Legends, Defense of the Ancients 2, and Amnesia the Dark Descent, in which he is the voice of Alexander, one of the lead characters.

His 1985 performance for Heart Theatre in the title role of Brecht’s The Life of Edward the Second of England, I wrote at the time, was “a tour de force. … His resonant voice, commanding appearance, kingly charisma and ability to grow old and feeble as the part demands, yet remain fiery to the end, would make this a play to remember even if all the other characters were duds,” which they were not.

In 1987 his vocal cords were paralyzed during surgery for thyroid cancer. He recovered fairly quickly. That same year he was “a deep-voiced prophet of doom,” as The Oregonian’s review put it, in the Ancient Greek Theater Festival’s Antigone. The following year I reviewed his memorable performance for the old New Rose Theatre in the children’s play Wiley and the Hairy Man, based on the old tall tales from the backwaters of Alabama and Mississippi: “As the Hairy Man, Sam A. Mowry is a raspy, threatening, slobberingly disgusting lout: a bad guy with style and a mighty strong roar.”

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As impressive as Mowry’s vocal skills were, he had much more going on as an actor. Reviewing a 1987 performance with Warren Harshbarger in Edward Albee’s two-hander The Zoo Story, I wrote: “For much of the play, Mowry’s role is to shy away, be politely diplomatic, respond with composure to an interesting but unnerving situation. Mowry handles it with humor and subtlety, playing well (as basketball aficionados put it) without the ball.”

Still, bigness was part of what Mowry was about. Sam idolized the larger-than-life Orson Welles, as a performer and director unafraid to think and act in a deep and oversized manner. And in 2010, for a holiday season performance at Tapestry Theatre of 1945 Christmas From Home, he got to play him, as Marty Hughley noted in The Oregonian: “Also striking is a cameo performance by Sam A. Mowry, who does a dead-on impression of radio showman Orson Welles.”

Intriguingly, Mowry’s acting career brushed close to the deities and their hangers-on on more occasions than his portrayal of the lion/god Aslan. In 1984, he played the Archangel Lucifer in Portland playwright Doug Watson’s The Creation. Phil Hunt reviewed the show for The Oregonian: “Lucifer is the strong member of this cast, bold one moment, sly the next, angelic at times, yet ready to get caught up in the same sin that he is promoting among the humans on occasion. … (the role is) done to near-perfection by Sam A. Mowry.”

In 1990 Columbia Theatre produced Bruce Graham’s Early One Evening at the Rainbow Bar and Grille, in which God and the bartender are sitting and having a beer after the humans have pretty much blown the planet to smithereens. Sam played the bartender. “As Shep, the intellectual bartender who writes trashy sex novels, Sam A. Mowry has the easygoing manner of a guy who can handle any trouble that walks through the door,” I wrote. “What with the world blowing up and all, he finds himself the target of two beautiful women out for a last-minute fling.”

And in a 1992 interview about Phoenix Theatre’s production of Christopher Fry’s The Lady’s Not for Burning, in which he starred as the doleful romantic hero, Thomas Mendip, Mowry noted: “Punishment back then was almost as much an entertainment as it was a punishment. If you’ve got a witch-burning or a hanging, it’s kind of like a double-header.”

As formidable as Mowry’s acting and directing skills were, they did not entirely account for the deep affection with which he was regarded in Portland’s theater community. In person, Sam was simply a lovely person. He was genuinely friendly: His voice, so dominating onstage, took on a softer eloquence as he spoke with you, and it usually seemed to be accompanied by a glint of humor, a kind of wrapping-up with warmth. “Sam said you should always tell someone you love that you love them, because you never know what’s going to happen,” his wife, Cindy, said.

His close companionship with Cindy, his wife of 30 years, and with his son, Atticus, were apparent, and they seemed to spill over to his large circle of friends and fellow workers, too. He and Cindy would host formal and informal gatherings at their Northeast Portland home, sometimes casual gatherings in what they called “the casbah,” sometimes group readings/slash/parties inside their house of the annual A Christmas Carol. He loved to be a mentor, McGean said — “he took that very seriously” — and if you were a newcomer to the theatrical circle, he would go out of his way to bring you in from the fringes. He loved collaboration. “He created this magical cathedral of community,” McGean said. “That was like a superpower.”

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“He was also an AIDS buddy before that was a term,” Sam’s sister Judith Mowry said. “He loved and supported Peter Fornara so much.” Sam was the prime AIDS caretaker for Fornara, the legendary Portland actor and director who had been a mentor to him, and to fellow actor Richard Avila, McGean said.

For more than 20 years, Mowry and McGean have been active in reviving radio drama as a form of theater through Willamette Radio Workshop, for which Sam was a founder and the director. In a 2019 ArtsWatch feature, John Longenbaugh wrote that in 2001, Mowry attended a meeting about forming a new audio drama company:

“’There was a notice in the paper saying that there was an informational meeting at the library about starting up a radio drama group,’ the veteran actor recalls. ‘I’d loved the form since I was a little kid, and had listened to it my entire life, through re-broadcasts. At the meeting there were 10 other people who I knew from here, and a couple that I hadn’t met but had been doing audio drama in Florida. …

“This plan evolved, and quickly, into the Willamette Radio Workshop, where after a few meetings it was decided to jump right in with an inaugural performance on October 30 at the CoHo Theater, with the most famous script of all, The Mercury Theatre’s production of The War of the Worlds. Like many ‘staged radio shows,’ the microphones were fake and the staged sound effects a rough approximation of the original, but the audiences were real enough. ‘There were people lining up as we were loading in, and it was completely packed.’”

McGean, who in the years since has written many of the scripts for Willamette Radio Workshop, remembers that opening War of the Worlds vividly. “It was after 9/11,” she says. “And let me tell you, that show felt very different under the circumstances.”

In addition to his wife, Cindy McGean, and his son, Atticus Mowry, Mowry is survived by his sisters Judith Mowry and Jane Galloway, and brother Paul Mowry.

Word of Sam’s death spread quickly on social media, and many friends and fellow theater workers commented. Among them:

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— Actor Kevin-Michael Moore: “Today’s news of the unexpected death of Sam A. Mowry has completely knocked the wind out of me. I have known this man my entire adult life. He was the performer that I wanted to be when I was a young man. He was a mentor, a colleague, and just a very good soul. We are all less without him. My heart hurts today.”

— Actress Clara-Liis Hillier: “I’m heartbroken. He was such a presence in my early acting years in Portland and I loved the time we spent together. He was such a force.”

— Actor, writer, and sketch comedian Ted Douglass: “… a gentle lion of a man and a constant, lovely fixture in the PDX theater scene. Rest in peace, good sir.”

— Playwright Steve Patterson: “Portland theatre lost a legend today: producer, director, voice talent, writer, radio impresario, and—especially—actor Sam Mowry has passed on. I lost a beloved friend of at least 30 years, which is nothing compared to what his family has lost. … If I learned anything from Sam’s life, it’s this. When you’re hanging out after a play or at an after-party or in the bar, and somebody comes up with an idea that you and your colleagues and friends think is great, and you all talk about how you should do it … do it. Especially if the idea comes from someone like Sam. Just do the damned thing. If it flies, it will forever remain a high point in your life. And if it falls, learn to smile and shrug.”

Actor and director Tony Sonera put it succinctly: “When Giants fall, it shakes the earth, and the world is changed forever. A Giant of Portland theatre has passed. Sam A. Mowry has fallen, and I am shaken.”

And on Sunday morning, after a surprise thunder and lightning storm shook the city like a dog tearing a stuffed toy to shreds, McGean wrote: “Can you hear him in this completely uncharacteristic Portland thunderstorm? ‘Blow winds and crack your cheeks! Rage, rage you cataracts and hurricanos!’”

Sam A. Mowry, it turns out, does not leave the stage quietly.

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