Since I Was Young I Was Playing Old: James Tolkan, 1931-2026

One of the things I loved about Nero Wolfe on A&E—during, as star Maury Chaykin put it, the time when A&E was going from a premiere entertainment channel to one that aired Dog the Bounty Hunter—was the use of an ensemble cast. In the sense of having an ensemble who played multiple characters. Yes, you’d get Chaykin as Wolfe and Timothy Hutton as Archie Goodwin and several others playing the same regular, but you’d get, for example, James Tolkan playing whoever they thought James Tolkan would succeed at playing in a given episode. It must have been a lot of fun to do as an actor, letting you show off your range.

Whereas most people don’t remember Tolkan had range. He attended Eastern Arizona College as a football scholarship, before leaving to join the Navy during the Korean War. A heart defect was responsible for his medical release, after which he graduated from the University of Iowa with a Bachelor’s in drama. From there, he joined the Actors Studio. He came to the attention of Sidney Lumet and was cast in Serpico and Prince of the City. He also had a Standard TV Career.

But you probably think of him as Strickland from Back to the Future. Pretty much everyone does. It’s a memorable role, after all. Strickland is one of the features of Hill Valley, with an identical ancestor who was a marshal in the past. The Back to the Future cartoon isn’t on his IMDb, and his Wikipedia only lists a single episode despite saying he’s on more than that. And I’m not sure I watched it even when it aired and certainly not since. But you couldn’t have had a Strickland without him, because the voice was so memorable.

A lot of his characters were along the lines of Strickland. Tough guys, even if in slightly improbable ways. He was good at it. He was a short, bald man, but he still came across as imposing. You absolutely believed that he’d back up whatever threat he was offering and that you’d come off the worse for it. In fact, his IMDb says he was 5’5”, and I don’t remember him as being that short. I suppose it helps that he was up against Michael J. Fox, himself not the world’s tallest man.

I do wish Nero Wolfe had gotten more than two seasons. And also a proper DVD release that wasn’t out of print, while we’re at it. Yes, all right, Tolkan could be a little stiff in some of his roles, but I always thought that was deliberate. And he was an outstanding addition to an ensemble cast that was worth coming back for over and over again. And it must have been nice to stretch a little, to be more than who he was expected to be. Even if I also assume the Back to the Future royalties were nice.