Obituaries : Ron Vawter; Acclaimed Stage, Film Actor

Ron Vawter, avant-garde stage actor seen in such mainstream films as “Philadelphia” and “Silence of the Lambs” but best remembered for a one-man show about two opposites on the issue of homosexuality, has died. He was 45.

Vawter, who had suffered from AIDS since 1991, died of a heart attack Saturday while flying from Zurich to New York, his agent, Philip Carlson, said Sunday.

The actor, who lived in New York’s Greenwich Village, had been performing a play about Sophocles in Brussels, Carlson said.

Vawter was recently seen as a colleague of Academy Award-winner Tom Hanks, who portrayed an attorney dying of AIDS in “Philadelphia.” Vawter’s stentorian voice earlier earned him roles as a psychiatrist in “sex, lies and videotape,” as hero Andy Garcia’s boss in “Internal Affairs” and as a Justice Department official in “Silence of the Lambs.”

“I generally get to play these Establishment types who have some sort of corruption of the soul,” Vawter said in a Times interview in 1992.

But he earned his greatest critical reviews for the one-man show “Roy Cohn/Jack Smith.” The show, for which Vawter won an Obie award, was about Cohn, a lawyer who worked for redbaiting Sen. Joseph McCarthy, and Smith, a New York performance artist. Cohn denied being homosexual but Smith flaunted it, and both died of AIDS in the late 1980s.

Vawter did the show at the Museum of Contemporary Art’s Ahmanson Auditorium in Los Angeles in 1992, as well as in New York, San Francisco, and cities in Ohio and Minnesota.

“They were both products of a society who continually told them that what they were, in the very depth of their being, was bad, wrong, immoral, twisted. It’s little wonder they grew up warped,” Vawter said of Cohn and Smith. “I’m always amazed that we homosexuals are doing as well as we are. Despite those signals from society, whatever is there is going to come out, either in a healthy way or in a destructive way. I just pray to God that it will be positive.”

Born to a military family in Albany, N.Y., Vawter enlisted in the Army on his 17th birthday and set out to become a chaplain for the Green Berets. But after studying theology and literature, he became an Army recruiting officer in New York City.

Moving into acting in the late 1970s, he helped his new colleagues found the Wooster Group, the experimental theater collective which spawned such performers as Spalding Gray and Willem Dafoe.