Denis Arndt, a distinguished stage and screen actor whose decades-long career spanned Shakespearean classics, Broadway triumphs, Hollywood roles, and 15 seasons with the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, died unexpectedly on March 25, 2025, at his home in Ashland. He was 85.
The death was confirmed by his wife of 45 years, Magee Downey. No cause was reported. He had suffered and recovered from a stroke in 2019.
He made his OSF debut in 1976 in the title character in King Lear, reprising the role in 1985. He also played title roles in Titus Andronicus, Brand, The Father, and Coriolanus; Kurt in The Dance of Death, Burgoyne in The Devil’s Disciple, James Tyrone Jr. in A Moon for the Misbegotten, Jamie Tyrone in Long Day’s Journey into Night, Jack Rover in Wild Oats, Iago in Othello, Archie Rice in The Entertainer, Dr. James Z. Appel, Richard J. Daley, General Earle Wheeler and Ensemble in The Great Society, and many others.
He made his last appearance on the OSF stage in 2014 as Prospero in Shakespeare’s The Tempest.
Arndt was perhaps best known for his gripping performance as Alex Priest in Simon Stephens’s two-character play, Heisenberg, which debuted at the Manhattan Theatre Club in 2015 before transferring to Broadway’s Samuel J. Friedman Theatre in 2016. His portrayal of an emotionally guarded Irish butcher navigating an unexpected romance opposite a much younger character played by Mary-Louise Parker earned him a Tony nomination for Best Actor in a Play in 2017.
Arndt was likely the only guy to make his Broadway debut at 77 that season. He was interviewed by Alexis Soloski for the New York Times just prior to the opening to celebrate the fact.
He met the writer at an oyster bar in Grand Central Terminal, sporting a Jerry Garcia swirling print tie. He told her he normally dressed up only for “openings and bat mitzvahs,” but was determined to make an occasion of the interview. And why not?
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“There’s not a hell of a lot of time left,” he told Soloski, downing an oyster. “There just isn’t. Actuarially, most guys my age are dead.”
Born on November 23, 1939, Arndt led an eventful early life before entering the world of professional acting.
He grew up near Seattle and was drawn to the theater as an adolescent at the prompting of a charismatic drama teacher.
He served as a helicopter pilot in the United States Army during the Vietnam War, earning both a Purple Heart and a Commendation Medal. Following his military service, he flew helicopters in Alaska before earning a degree at the University of Washington, using the G.I. Bill. It was there that his passion for theater took flight. While managing an apartment house, he became friendly with a director and drifted back into the theater.
He was a founding member of Seattle’s Intiman Theatre, and helped shape the Pacific Northwest’s theater landscape.
Beyond the stage, he cultivated a substantial presence on screen. His film credits included Basic Instinct (1992), How to Make an American Quilt (1995), and Metro (1997), while his television work spanned guest and recurring roles on L.A. Law, Picket Fences, Grey’s Anatomy, The Good Fight, and Supernatural, among others.
Arndt’s career took him to regional theaters across the country, from the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles to Arena Stage in Washington, D.C. He performed at The Public Theater in New York, where he played Northumberland in Richard II.
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In retirement, he enjoyed time with family, working on his property, and sailing.
He is survived by his wife, their three adult children, four adult children from a previous marriage, and many grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
In accordance with his wishes, no services will be held.
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This story was published originally on March 28, 2025 at ashland.news.
I watched Denis Arndt perform many times over the years, almost always with deep pleasure: He was a rare and vivid performer. I recall many years ago sitting in on a rehearsal at OSF for one of his shows — maybe “The Entertainer,” or one of Eugene O’Neill’s plays — and watching how he and director Jerry Turner would go at it, two stallions with sometimes divergent opinions but a common goal, both bent on shaping the very best production they could, and finding a way together to get to it.
I rustled through some files to find what I’d written about Denis, and discovered this about a 1981 OSF production of John O’Keeffe’s “Wild Oats”: “Denis Arndt and Stuart Duckworth, in ’81, played [the two main characters with a] reckless, amoral tinge. They were a little ruthless, a little spoiled around the edges, a little dirtied by the hard knocks of unshackled youth.
“When Arndt spouted Shakespeare it had a dark exterior: It was something he was using for effect to feed his image and advance his libido. He was posturing. But beneath the show you could see the trueness of the words begin to nibble into his soul and transform him. Words became deeds, conquered the corrupt, shaped the true man. That was the sharp shock of comedy.”
Arndt directed a fine production of Yasmina Reza’s “God of Carnage” in 2011 for Portland’s Artists Rep, and in 2009 he played the Devil in Artists Rep’s fine production of Conan McPherson’s “The Seafarer,” directed by Allen Nause. It was an excellent example of Arndt’s ability to give a singular performance while also blending in beautifully with the rest of the cast. My response indicates the true actors’ gift of creating a singularity that helps create a greater whole:
“Ah, the Devil. If he’s not the central character here, he’s certainly the catalytic one. It’s Christmas Eve in a garbage-strewn hole-in-the-wall north of Dublin, a place littered with junk-food wrappings and cigarette stubs and empty beer cans and — oh, over there — the wracked hulk of an old blind drunk hacking and wheezing and slowly rising from the rubble of tattered bed things strewn on the floor.
“That would be Richard (Tobias Andersen, in a drippingly physical, coarsely acerbic and illuminatingly optimistic performance), the supposedly helpless proprietor of this dump, a testy chunk of phlegm who barks and natters like Ubu Roi — imperious king of the dung hill.
“Caring for him, and strangely following his orders, is Richard’s tightly coiled and precariously controlled brother Sharky, a notorious drunk and hothead and womanizer who’s on the wagon and trying to maintain after losing a decent job by getting a little too friendly with his boss’s wife. Bill Geisslinger is wonderfully cool and hot in this role, a fascinating contradiction of attraction and repellence: the smartest guy in the room, and the one who does the dumbest things. The one who keeps things going, and the one who’s utterly unreliable. The one who fights furiously for his life, and the one who’s let himself sink into despair.
“Their bumbling friend Ivan (Todd Van Voris, in a deliciously sad-hilarious performance that reins itself in just this side of hamminess) prompts enough laughter from his morning-after woes to give a real drunk a splitting headache — and late in the play, in the clutches when Ivan’s own dark secret spills out and every nuance counts, Van Voris deepens into a brief but bleak pain that explains the not-so-comic dissolution of Ivan’s blowing-in-the-wind existence.
“Somewhere Ivan has a wife, whom he feels cowed by, but he’d rather escape into the bosom of the boys and the booze, and you get the sense that, like these other men, what his life is missing most is the calming, balancing influence of domesticity, which for one reason or another, each seems to feel he doesn’t deserve.
“Into this oddly comic rotting fleshpile walks Sharky’s old nemesis Nicky (Leif Norby), who married Sharky’s wife after Sharky blew that chapter of his life, and a natty stranger, the meticulous Mr. Lockhart (Denis Arndt).
“Mr. Lockhart is, of course, the Devil, and on this night he and the boys are going to play cards, and the ultimate wager, the calling-in of an old debt, is Sharky’s soul — a pitiful, seemingly worthless thing, but then, it’s Sharky’s own, and he’d rather keep it himself. It seems that the unseen but omnipresent character in The Seafarer, God, favors Sharky’s hand, too.
“… What’s always struck me about Arndt’s performances is how meticulously thought out yet precipitously on the edge they are. He takes you to the tipping point. And while his body does amazing things — Marty Hughley, in his fine review of The Seafarer for The Oregonian, noted that Arndt “walks as if Lockhart, uncomfortable in a borrowed form, finds the human knee a vaguely ridiculous mechanism” — it’s the workings of his mind that truly fascinate. He has a way of turning his characters’ thought processes inside out, so you can almost see his brain furiously working: tick-tick-tick.
“In this play Mr. Lockhart’s crisp clean look stands out. He’s genial (at least, at first) yet separated from the slovenliness around him, and gradually you begin to see not just his disdain for the loamy filth of this all-too-human gathering but also a fear of it, and a basic, unbridgeable incomprehension. What is it about these pitiable, short-lived creatures that makes God prefer them to him? In Arndt’s, and McPherson’s, calculation, what makes the Devil the Devil is a void: He simply can’t understand the messy essence, the striving and failing, the hurting and comforting, the cowardliness and occasional bravery, of being human and being alive. Those things elude Mr. Lockhart as surely as the divinity of Mozart eludes Salieri in Amadeus. And for that, the Devil is eternally locked out, eternally on the outside. He holds the losing hand.”
Thank you, Denis Arndt, for the great gifts you gave to us.