Ron Silver Dies at 62

NY Times: Ron Silver, a versatile actor and independent-minded political activist who played Henry Kissinger, Alan Dershowitz and Angelo Dundee on the screen and supported Bill Clinton, Rudolph W. Giuliani and George W. Bush on the stump, died at home in Manhattan on Sunday. He was 62.

The cause was esophageal cancer, which was diagnosed two years ago, said his brother Mitchell.

...Mr. Silver was busy as a nonperformer as well. An activist most frequently allied with left-wing issues, he was president of Actors’ Equity, the stage actors union, for most of the 1990s, and he was a co-founder of the Creative Coalition, a group that advocates for First Amendment rights, public education and arts support. He campaigned for Bill Clinton for president.

“I’m an actor by calling but an activist by inclination,” he said in a 1994 interview.

Still, he had contrary impulses, and he paid attention to them. He was an advocate for President Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars” defense plan, and he supported Mr. Giuliani’s campaign for mayor of New York in 1994. In 2004, he made headlines when he was a featured speaker at the Republican National Convention in Manhattan, supporting the nomination of President George W. Bush for a second term, largely because of his stance against Islamic terrorism. He supported Mr. Giuliani for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008.

[...]

...“Ron’s politics, as far as I know, were not shared by anyone he knew, except for the people he knew because of his politics,” Mitchell Silver said. He paused and added: “He told me that he did vote for Barack Obama in the end.”