I remember reading about Elcar's encroaching blindness several years ago. At the time he blamed himself for not having gotten regular eye checkups which could have caught the glaucoma in the early stages. As this article mentions, he was indeed one of those ubiquitous actors that showed up on a host of TV shows and movies, the consummate character. You know, with the slow demise of TV movies (at least on the "major" networks) and the growth of reality shows, I wonder if opportunities for character actors like Elcar and the late Sid Haig are vanishing? I just know that I seem to notice fewer of those ubiquitous appearances by actors nowadays.... "MacGyver" Boss Dies By Joal Ryan When Dana Elcar began to lose his eyesight during the fourth season of MacGyver, the actor became as resourceful as the TV show's gadget-handy titular hero, suggesting that his character be allowed to grow blind with him. Elcar, the familiar prime-time face who enjoyed his longest run as MacGyver's boss Pete Thornton on the 1986-1992 adventure series, died Monday in a Ventura, California, hospital of complications from pneumonia, the Los Angeles Times reported. He was 77. Taking up Elcar's invitation, producers wrote in vision problems for Thornton, solving a dilemma for his portrayer. In a speech to the 1991 convention of the National Federation of the Blind, Elcar said that with glaucoma fast robbing him of sight he told MacGyver executive producer Steve Downing that something had to be done. "We have to make Pete Thornton have the same qualities, the same visual abilities that I have, or we're going to run into trouble," Elcar said, recounting the conversation. "I can no longer jump out of helicopters. I can't run down hill at night at a fast pace over logs. It simply will not work." The next day, the actor said, Downing called back. And that was that. The 1991 season closer, "Hind-Sight," saw Elcar's character undergo surgery for glaucoma. Before becoming a can-do symbol for the vision-impaired, Elcar simply was a busy actor. Though never a leading man, his sturdy, compact build made him the perfect authority figure to a host of exasperating charges in the 1970s and 1980s. He was Richard Dean Anderson's Phoenix Foundation superior on MacGyver, Robert Blake's original lieutenant on Baretta and Robert Conrad's commanding officer on Baa Baa Black Sheep. In network TV's golden age of the episodic drama, Elcar was ubiquitous. The Internet Movie Database lists 109 guest-starring credits. The Rockford Files, B.J. and the Bear, Eight Is Enough, Knight Rider, Hart to Hart, Hardcastle and McCormick, The A-Team, Trapper John, M.D.--Elcar did them all, and more. Elcar stood in for the late Edward Platt to play--what else?-- Don Adams' boss in the 1980 Get Smart movie, The Nude Bomb. Other big-screen credits included The Sting and 2010. Born Oct. 10, 1927, in Ferndale, Michigan, Elcar was inspired to go into acting at age 13 after watching Citizen Kane over and over and over again at an all-night movie theater, his son, Dane Elcar, told the Times. Elcar's career would go on to span TV's bargain-basement beginnings--a 1954 soap opera, A Time to Live, that aired in 15-minute-long installments--to its big-money prime--a 2002 episode of ER, included. Even an industry veteran like Elcar, though, worried about what impending blindness would do to his career. "You hear a lot of things about Hollywood, about how hard it is, how cold it is, how mean it is," he said in his 1991 address. "And yet there were people [on MacGyver] who immediately responded and said, '...We want you on the program--you are good for the program.' " Richard Dean Anderson did not disagree. "At a time when I had very little business being called an actor," Anderson said of Elcar to the Times, "he made things so easy for me."
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