Nicholas Coster, a staple of soap operas who starred in All the President’s Men, Reds, Stir Crazy, as well as Another World, Santa Barbara, and All My Children, has died.
Along with performing on Broadway alongside Laurence Olivier and Liz Taylor, he also appeared in “All the President’s Men,” “Reds,” and “The Facts of Life.”
On Monday, Coster, 89, passed suddenly in a Florida hospital, according to a Facebook post from his daughter Dinneen Coster
She wrote, “Please remember him as a fantastic artist. He excelled as an actress! He has always been an inspiration to me, and I am so grateful to have him as a parent.”
Coster is a well-known character actor who typically does harsh roles. He portrayed chief of detectives J.E. Carson on The Misadventures of Sheriff Lobo before making a brief cameo as Blair Warner’s millionaire father on The Facts of Life, an episode of another 1980s NBC sitcom.
He regularly appeared on Broadway, and in 1961, he made his Broadway debut as Lawrence Olivier’s understudy in Becket, playing Henry II. Twenty years later, he appeared alongside Elizabeth Taylor in Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes.
In Alan J. Pakula’s 1976 novel All the President’s Men, Coster portrayed Markham, a defense attorney for the Watergate suspects. Along with these roles, he appeared in Sidney Poitier’s Stir Crazy (1980), Warren Beatty’s Reds (1981), and Joseph Sargent’s MacArthur (1977) as a dentist named Paul Trullinge