John Spencer (actor)

John Spencer was born John Speshock Jr., on December 20, 1946, in New York City, and was raised in Totowa, New Jersey.^[1] He was the son of blue-collar parents Mildred (née Benzeroski), a waitress, and John Speshock Sr., a truck driver.^[2] Spencer's father was of Irish and Czech descent,^[3] while his mother was of Ukrainian and Rusyn ancestry.^[4][5] Spencer’s parents were disappointed when he chose to become an actor.^[6] With his enrollment at the Professional Children's School in Manhattan in 1963, Spencer found himself sharing classes with such fellow students as Liza Minnelli and violinist Pinchas Zukerman. He attended Fairleigh Dickinson University, but did not complete a degree.^[1] Spencer often referred to himself as a "dyed-in-the-wool liberal" and described Franklin Delano Roosevelt as one of his heroes.^[7]

Spencer began his television career on The Patty Duke Show, and eventually began appearing in supporting roles in feature films beginning with 1983's WarGames. He won an Obie Award for the 1981 off Broadway production of Still Life, about a Vietnam War veteran, and received a Drama Desk nomination for The Day Room. In 1986 he appeared on Broadway as Dan White, the killer of Harvey Milk, in Execution of Justice, alongside Stanley Tucci and Wesley Snipes. Spencer was a supporting actor in the hit 1990 courtroom thriller Presumed Innocent, portraying a tough veteran homicide detective, starring opposite Harrison Ford. Spencer's work also extended to video games, portraying the role of Captain Hugh Paulsen in the 1995 video game Wing Commander IV: The Price of Freedom. Spencer's subsequent film and television work primarily consisted of supporting roles such as a colleague and friend to Billy Crystal's basketball referee in Forget Paris and a prickly FBI Director in Michael Bay's film The Rock.

In 1990 Spencer joined the cast of the television series L.A. Law, playing street-wise attorney Tommy Mullaney from 1990 to 1994.^[8][9] Spencer originally was not going to take the role but after reading five pages of the script he was convinced and said "it was one of the best scripts I'd read". Spencer said the character's disheveled wardrobe was based on his own.^[10] Spencer said he and co-star Cecil Hoffman spent time in New York City to prepare for the role.^[11]

In 1999, Spencer was cast as Leo McGarry on the NBC political drama series The West Wing. McGarry was White House Chief of Staff to the fictional U.S. President Jed Bartlet throughout the series' run. He was a recovering alcoholic, a compulsive worker, and a former U.S. Air Force pilot during the Vietnam War.^[12][13] McGarry would later be chosen as Matt Santos's running mate in the show's seventh and final season. Spencer's role on the show earned him the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series in 2002, for the show's third season episodes "Bartlet for America" and "We Killed Yamamoto."

Spencer was married once and was divorced in the 1970s; he had no children.^[14]

Spencer quit drinking in 1989 after over 20 years of addiction to alcohol.^[15] He was extremely close with his West Wing co-star Martin Sheen.

Spencer died of a heart attack in a Los Angeles hospital on December 16, 2005.^[4] Many of Spencer's West Wing co-stars paid tribute to him at his funeral, including Martin Sheen, Dulé Hill, Joshua Malina, Janel Moloney, Richard Schiff, Alan Alda, Jimmy Smits, Aaron Sorkin, Allison Janney, James Mangold, David E. Kelley, and Bradley Whitford.^[16][17] Kristin Chenoweth sang the musical number "For Good" from the Winnie Holzman and Stephen Schwartz Wizard of Oz musical Wicked. Spencer's remains were interred at Laurel Grove Memorial Park in his hometown of Totowa, New Jersey.

At the time of his death, Spencer had filmed two episodes of The West Wing’s seventh and final season that were in post-production – "Running Mates" and "The Cold" (Episodes 10 and 13, respectively).^[18] In both episodes, the character Spencer was playing, Leo McGarry, was portrayed as a candidate for vice president. These episodes aired after his death. But because Spencer died before the end of his character’s storyline had been filmed, the show's writers adapted to his absence by eventually describing McGarry as having died of a heart attack on election night. (This was the more plausible because, ironically, in the show's sixth season, McGarry had been portrayed as suffering a near-fatal heart attack.) Spencer's name remained in the opening credits of each episode aired in the months after his death, throughout the remainder of the show.

• John Spencer at IMDb