Tom Bower, the longtime character actor whose career took him from The Waltons to It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia, has died. He was 86.
The Colorado-born actor was perhaps best known for the role of Marvin, the janitor who helps Bruce Willis’s character John McClane foil the terrorists at the airport in the 1990 action thriller Die Hard 2.
He died in his sleep at his home in Los Angeles on May 30, his sister-in-law Mary Miller told The Hollywood Reporter.
Bower was born Ralph Thomas Bower in Denver on January 3, 1938. As a child he dreamed of playing baseball professionally, but instead moved to New York in 1956 to enrol at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts.
The following year he worked on John Cassavetes’ directorial debut, Shadows, having studied acting at the John Cassavetes Shadows Workshop.
He then left acting to spend a couple of years as a private investigator in Boston, working with attorney F. Lee Bailey. He was still PI when he was cast David Rabe’s The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel in 1972, starring opposite Al Pacino.
Following that success, Bower drove to Los Angeles to return to acting full-time. He landed small roles on episodes of Get Christie Love!, The Rockford Files and Kojak.
In 1975 he guest-starred as the pilot Rex Barker in The Waltons‘ episode “The Wing Walker.” The following season he joined the regular cast in a different role, playing Dr Curtis Willard.
His varied career included several memorable performances as fathers, including playing the father of the 37th U.S. president in Oliver Stone’s Nixon (1995) and the father of Nicolas Cage‘s character Terence McDonagh in Werner Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (2009).
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He remained busy throughout his later years, making memorable appearances in Senior Love Triangle (2019), El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie (2019), Fully Realized Humans (2020) and Raymond & Ray (2022).
In 2005 he joined the first season of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia as Heinrich "Pop-Pop" Landgraf, the grandfather of Dennis and Dee Reynolds. On the show, the family knew him as a decorated WWII war hero, but didn’t realize he was an SS officer. Bower reprised his role for the 2012 episode “Pop-Pop: The Final Solution.”
Bower is survived by his children Viv and Rob; his grandchildren, Nicole, Jonathan, Lucille and Henry; his brother, Bobby, and his sister, Shirley.
Ursula, Bower’s wife of 51 years, died in August at the age of 75. Her sister told The Hollywood Reporter that they never spent a day apart.
