CULVER CITY, California – Charles Kimbrough, an American actor known for his patrician looks and stately bearing who was nominated for an Emmy Award for portraying a comically rigid news anchor on the hit sitcom Murphy Brown (1988 to 1998), died on Jan 11 in Culver City, California. He was 86.

His son John Kimbrough confirmed the death.

After decades of stage work in New York, including a Tony Award-nominated performance in the original 1970 Broadway production of the Stephen Sondheim musical Company, Charles Kimbrough finally got his first taste of mainstream fame alongside actress Candice Bergen on Murphy Brown, the popular series set in a television newsroom that ran for 10 seasons.

He reprised his character for three episodes of the short-lived 2018 reboot.

As Jim Dial, Kimbrough artfully toyed with the wooden archetype of a 1980s newsman, with his lacquered helmet of hair, Walter Cronkite-like air of seriousness and old-boy swagger – he lovingly referred to Bergen’s investigative reporter character as “Slugger”.

His rigid, pompous manner made him the ideal straight man for the show’s ever-topical plot lines. But it was hardly the first role that allowed him to explore fussy or priggish characters.

In the 2012 Broadway revival of Harvey, the Pulitzer Prize-winning 1944 play about a man (played by Jim Parsons) who ends up in a sanitarium because of his friendship with an imaginary rabbit about 180cm tall, Kimbrough played the exacting psychiatrist who is obsessed with the image of his institution.

Not that Kimbrough ever sought to play stiffs. “Unfortunately, I’m really good at playing jacka**es of one kind or another,” he told The Wall Street Journal in 2012. “I’ve always been slightly self-conscious as an actor, and I guess that sometimes reads as pomposity.”

“Starting when I was 30,” he continued, “I somehow gave off an impression at an audition that had them mentally put me in a three-piece suit or put an attache case in my hand. If there was a stiff-guy part, the director would brighten up when I came in. That wasn’t the response I wanted. I was in anguish.”

It was not always so. As a younger actor, “he played a wide variety of characters who were much more dynamic”, John Kimbrough said in a phone interview.

As Charles Kimbrough put it in a 2002 interview with American daily Newsday: “When I first came to New York, I’d played these sweaty, physical guys who bounded all over the stage. I didn’t do a show when I wasn’t soaking wet at the end.”

Even so, he had a natural feel for playing emotionally repressed characters, in part because of his own family background.

“He came from a buttoned-up Mid-western family, and so he had grown up with people very much like the characters he played,” his son said. “They felt very deeply, but kept it hidden beneath a facade of manners and propriety. Somehow, he was able to communicate that feeling to audiences, even as the guys he played were keeping it all inside.”

Charles Mayberry Kimbrough was born on May 23, 1936, in St Paul, Minnesota, the older of two children of Charles and Emily (Raudenbush) Kimbrough. When he was a young child, the family moved to Highland Park, Illinois, near Chicago, where his father sold commercial heating equipment.

A lover of music, particularly opera, Kimbrough majored in music and theatre at Indiana University and later received a master’s degree from the Yale School of Drama in Connecticut.

Moving to New York, he endured the typical struggles of a young actor until he got his big break as Harry, a hard-drinking husband fighting off the lure of the bottle, in a production of Company directed by Harold Prince.

The celebrated Sondheim musical follows a single man, his girlfriends and the couples he knows as they navigate the complexities of loneliness and love in New York City.

In a roundabout way, Kimbrough found love himself through the production, albeit three decades later.

In 2002, years after his divorce in 1991 from his first wife, Mary Jane (Wilson) Kimbrough, an actress he had met at Yale, he married Beth Howland, who had acted alongside him in Company as an anxiety-ridden bride.

Howland had later found fame as a flighty diner waitress on the long-running sitcom Alice (1976 to 1985). She died in 2016.

In addition to his son, Kimbrough is survived by a sister, Linda Kimbrough, and a stepdaughter, Holly Howland.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Kimbrough continued to work steadily, appearing on television shows like crime drama Kojak (1973 to 1978), while also paying the bills as a wholesome American in television spots for products such as Imperial margarine.

But it was only with Murphy Brown, his son said, that he found the degree of fame where fans recognised him on the street. And his success allowed him to make peace with being typecast as stodgy.

He came to realise that “stuffiness is not dullness”, Charles Kimbrough told Newsday. “And that gave me a new lease on life.” NYTIMES