George Dickerson obit

George Dickerson, Actor in David Lynch’s ‘Blue Velvet,’ Dies at 81

He also stood out on 'Hill Street Blues,' in addition to being a writer, poet, editor, playwright and United Nations diplomat. 

He was not on the list.

George Dickerson, who played police detective John Williams in David Lynch’s bizarre crime drama Blue Velvet, has died, his son, Finnish film writer-director Dome Karukoski, announced on Facebook. He was 81.

Dickerson, who also had a recurring role as Police Commander Swanson in the first season of the acclaimed 1980s NBC cop drama Hill Street Blues, died Jan. 10 after a long illness, Karukoski said. Dickerson had been living in New York.

Karukoski’s Heart of a Lion played at the recent Palm Springs International Film festival, and another of his features, The Grump, screened at the Toronto Film Festival in September.

At the start of Blue Velvet (1986), college student Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan) finds a severed human ear in a field and takes it to Dickerson’s character, putting the story in motion. Laura Dern plays the detective’s high school daughter who helps the curious Beaumont try to figure out where the ear came from.

“I am proud to have been in it,” Dickerson said in a 2008 interview with Dan Schneider. “My biggest regret is that I lost at least a third of my role in the editing room, the whole central arc of my character’s actions. David was forced to cut the film below two hours, and a lot of wonderful scenes got lost.”

Before turning to acting, Dickerson worked as a magazine writer, poet, editor and playwright; was a United Nations diplomat in Lebanon; and served as a speechwriter for U.S. Congressman Robert Steele. One of his best friends was singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen, whom he met at comparative literature class at Columbia University.

Beset with writer’s block, Dickerson took acting classes and landed work in off-Broadway plays. That led to a role as a Mafia bad guy from New Orleans on the CBS soap Search for Tomorrow, but his character was killed off. He then moved to Hollywood and guest-starred in an October 1979 episode on the NBC spy series A Man Called Sloane, starring Robert Conrad.

Dickerson said his acting career took off after Hill Street Blues. “My friends, who knew and loved my writing, hated my becoming an actor,” he told Schneider.

Dickerson also appeared in the films Psycho II (1983), No Mercy (1986), Death Wish 4: The Crackdown (1987) and A Stranger in the Kingdom (1999); played General William Tecumseh Sherman in the 1991 telefilm Son of the Morning Star; and showed up in the TV series The Incredible Hulk, Little House on the Prairie, Miami Vice, Hunter, Three’s Company, Father Murphy, Sledge Hammer! and L.A. Law.

Dickerson was born July 25, 1933, in Topeka, Kansas, to George Graf Dickerson, a lawyer, and Elizabeth Dickerson (née Naumann), parents he did not have a good relationship with. He had one brother, five years his junior. As a child, his family lived in Michigan, the South Side of Chicago, Queens, New York, and Virginia. From 1965, he lived in the same apartment in Manhattan, one once rented by critic James Agee, whom Dickerson claimed to have spiritual contact with.

Dickerson served in the U.S. Army from December 1953 to the fall of 1954. He graduated from Yale University in 1955, after studying with novelist and poet Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks, advocates of New Criticism. After working a teaching job in Vermont, Dickerson read his poems at venues with Beatnik poets such as Gregory Corso, Diane di Prima, and Ted Joans. His poetry was praised by novelist Norman Mailer.

He maintained long term friendships with many well-known artists, including songwriter Leonard Cohen, actor Richard Widmark, playwright Arthur Miller, actor Roscoe Lee Browne, opera soprano Leontyne Price, Edna St. Vincent Millay’s sister, Norma Ellis, John Farrar, and ex-Poet Laureate Mark Strand.

In the 1970s, after a decade in the literary world, Dickerson worked as Press Secretary and speech writer for U.S. Congressman Robert Steele (R- Connecticut), and Head of Press and Publications for UNRWA (the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East) at its headquarters in Beirut, Lebanon, where he experienced the Lebanese Civil War in 1975 and 1976.

Dickerson married four times and had five children: two daughters by his first wife, a son by his third wife, a daughter by his fourth wife, and a son born out of wedlock with a Finnish journalist; Finnish film director Dome Karukoski. He was romantically involved with 1960s supermodel Veruschka.

Dickerson spoke five languages: English, French, German, Arabic, and Italian. While not religious, he claims a belief in God. He suffered from Crohn's disease.

Dickerson was a Democrat, and only once voted Republican, for former New York City mayor John V. Lindsay. Of his politics, Dickerson said, 'I wasn’t involved in the Civil Rights movement. That is a failure on my part. I wasn’t really political until I started writing about world affairs for Time. I didn’t see my Black friends as black and they sensed that, so the subject didn’t come up between us, as hard as that may be to believe. We talked about what close friends talk about when there are no issues between them…struggles with their writing, with their wives…

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