Charles Cioffi, Character Actor in ‘Shaft,’ ‘Klute,’ and ‘The X-Files,’ Dies at 90

Charles Cioffi, one of the more quietly indispensable character actors of his generation, died May 22 at his home in Marina del Rey, California. He was 90. The cause was natural causes. His wife, Anne, confirmed the death to TMZ.

Cioffi spent more than six decades working across film, television, and the stage — a career that began at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis in the early 1960s and eventually placed him in some of the defining films of the 1970s. He made his Broadway debut in 1968 in a production of King Lear at the Repertory Theatre of Lincoln Center, and went on to appear in seven Broadway productions total, including the original 1969 cast of the musical 1776 and a 1975 production of Hamlet with Sam Waterston in the title role and Jane Alexander as Gertrude.

His most memorable film work came in 1971, when two very different roles arrived in the same year. In Alan J. Pakula’s Klute, he played the menacing figure stalking the call girl Bree Daniels, played by Jane Fonda in her Oscar-winning performance. The same year, he appeared in Gordon Parks’ landmark crime film Shaft as Lt. Vic Androzzi, the New York City detective who reluctantly partners with Richard Roundtree’s private eye John Shaft. Both films became cultural touchstones; both had Cioffi in the cast.

Through the 1970s he moved fluidly between tough-guy pictures and television. He played gangland figures in Lucky Luciano (1973), The Don Is Dead (1973), and Crazy Joe (1974), and joined the cast of the ABC cop series Get Christie Love! (1974–75) as Lt. Matt Reardon, the superior of Teresa Graves’ pioneering Black female detective. In the 1980s, he played Tom Cruise’s working-class father in All the Right Moves and appeared alongside Telly Savalas in four Kojak telefilms (1989–90) as Chief George Morris.

Younger audiences may know him best from The X-Files, where he played FBI Section Chief Scott Blevins across six episodes — the bureaucrat who, in the show’s mythology, was responsible for pairing Dana Scully with Fox Mulder and assigning her to investigate the paranormal cases. The role put him inside one of the most-watched shows of the 1990s.

His other television credits span nearly every major network drama of the past fifty years: Hawaii Five-O, Bonanza, The A-Team, Thirtysomething, NYPD Blue, Frasier, Wings, and The Practice, among them. He is survived by his wife Anne, two sons, and nieces and nephews.