J. Anderson; Film, Stage and TV Actor

John Anderson, the lanky, hatchet-faced actor whose characterizations ranged from a meddling car salesman in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho” to a TV portrayal of Franklin D. Roosevelt, is dead at 69.

Anderson, who also boasted several Broadway stage credits, died of a heart attack Friday at his Sherman Oaks home, said Nicholas Pryor, a friend and neighbor.

Anderson, who earned a master’s degree in drama from the University of Iowa, began his acting career on the Mississippi River showboat Goldenrod.

After a year at the Cleveland Playhouse, he moved to New York, where he appeared in off-Broadway and Broadway productions, including the Broadway show of “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.”

In recent weeks, he was preparing for the Broadway production of “In the Sweet By and By,” which he had appeared in at Los Angeles’ Back Alley Theater in 1986. He won that year’s Los Angeles Drama Critics Award for a featured performance.

But he was perhaps best known for his work in television, having appeared in more than 500 roles, including frequent 1960s appearances on “The Twilight Zone.”

More recently, his credits included a recurring role as the grandfather of television’s “MacGyver.”

In 1979, he was FDR in the “Backstairs at the White House” miniseries devoted to the private lives of eight U.S. presidents.

In 1976-77, Anderson was Scotty in “Rich Man, Poor Man--Book II,” the sequel to the 1976 series while two decades earlier he had been Marshal Wyatt Earp’s brother Virgil in “The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp.”

In addition to “Psycho,” he appeared in such other feature films as “Smokey and the Bandit II,” “Ride the High Country” and “Cotton Comes to Harlem.”

His work in television and movie Westerns won him the National Cowboy Hall of Fame’s Western Heritage Award in 1967.

Anderson is survived by two sisters, two children, five grandchildren and a great grandson.