“We’re all dying the minute we’re born. Goes quick. Don’t waste it. Don’t waste it.”

These phrases, muttered by Harris Yulin’s terminally unwell retiree Buddy Fixer within the fourth season of Netflix’s crime drama “Ozark,” feels unusually becoming for the character actor’s 87 years of life. A consummate character actor, Yulin carved out a area of interest for many years in Hollywood as a kind of basic “that man”s of a sort you hardly ever see anymore.

In case you wished somebody in regulation enforcement, huge enterprise, or nationwide safety grumbling orders (notably if stated character had been corrupt), you referred to as Yulin. Want somebody who may ship a home-run joke with the identical deadpan effectivity as a menace? You referred to as Yulin. He delivered practically 200 on-screen performances all the way in which up to his passing this previous Tuesday, all of them completely calibrated for optimum menace or geniality, relying on what the function referred to as for.

Born in Los Angeles in 1937, Yulin started his life on the steps of an orphanage, the place he was deserted as an toddler. 4 months later, he was adopted by Russian Jewish dad and mom who imparted his final title and introduced him up. However his journey to performing got here after “playing around in Europe for a couple of years” after a stint within the military, he says in one interview, doing small exhibits and a nightclub act with William Burroughs. (“That was nice enjoyable,” he remarked.) He finally landed at UCLA, the place he would research theatre with Jeff Corey, then made his off-Broadway debut in 1963 with Subsequent Time I’ll Sing for You.

Yulin would proceed to construct his Broadway bona fides, particularly as a practitioner of William Shakespeare’s works: he would have roles in A Midsummer Night time’s Dream, Richard III, and King John, in addition to a celebrated flip as Hamlet in 1974. However that very same decade, he would get away on the massive display screen in Frank Perry’s anti-Western “Doc,” taking part in Wyatt Earp to Stacy Keach’s Doc Holliday. Even at his youngest on-screen, Yulin appears grizzled, seasoned, a deeply assured presence beneath that balding head and thick mustache. He had the form of eyes that might bore deeply into your soul, a resolute frown that might talk every part from disappointment to deep rancor.

Yulin takes twenty minutes to seem in his first movie, “Doc,” however his presence looms massive over the primary act of Holliday’s journey. After they lastly meet in a bar saloon, Yulin’s Earp laments the outlaws that strive to make mayhem in his down. Keach’s response seems like a metatextual portent of the sorts of roles Yulin would spend his profession embodying:

“If it weren’t for unhealthy individuals, what would you do for a dwelling?”

Certainly, Yulin made fairly the profession taking part in all method of unhealthy guys; in “Scarface,” he performs a sleazy detective attempting to lower off a piece of Tony Montana’s enterprise. In 1994’s “Clear and Current Hazard,” he performs a corrupt nationwide safety advisor taking part in each side towards one another within the Conflict on Medication. “Coaching Day,” corrupt detective. “Rush Hour 2,” a Secret Service agent who—you guessed it—is on the take. Yulin had a function to fill, and he crammed it with gusto; his characters had been at all times full of a form of businesslike conviction, which he may convey with a easy arched eyebrow or misleading sneer.

He introduced that power to tv as nicely, turning into a stalwart of the medium for many years. “Kojak,” “Legislation & Order,” “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” “Veep,” and extra all featured quick however candy visitor runs by Yulin, who at all times introduced a steely-eyed depth to even the smallest roles. (One such visitor flip, as an implicitly mob-connected fixer who will get Niles Crane’s spouse Maris out of a authorized jam for a worth on “Frasier,” earned him an Emmy nomination.)

However for my cash, the function that made essentially the most of Yulin’s unmistakable gravitas was “Star Trek: Deep House 9”‘s first-season episode “Duet,” the place he seems as a Cardassian customer arrested on the station for doubtlessly being a conflict prison. The episode performs largely as a two-hander between Yulin’s Aamin Marritza and Nana Customer’s Kira Nerys, because the latter makes an attempt to pin down Marritza’s alleged function within the Nazi-like occupation that her individuals, the Bajorans, suffered for many years by the hands of his. Because the layers peel again on Marritza’s true identification, Yulin modulates his efficiency expertly by way of reams of ’90s sci-fi prosthetics: First as an avoidant simpleton, then as a blustering commandant blissful to taunt Kira for his deception. Then, simply as Kira discerns the reality, so can we: Marritza isn’t the quilt for Cardassian mass assassin Gul Darhe’el—he simply wished to fake to be Darhe’el to assist assuage his personal guilt at his complicity in Cardassia’s crimes, serving himself up as martyr to assist the Bajoran individuals heal.

In a single scene, Yulin demonstrates the form of vary that befitted a character actor of his stature. He may maintain himself with such stillness, conveying volumes of wit, knowledge and world-weariness; he may vent spleen with one of the best of them, staring daggers into the weakest amongst us; and he may break down and cry on the weight of all he’s completed, vulnerability lastly profitable out amongst his grizzled stature.

That one episode is a drop within the bucket in contrast to his volumes of labor earlier than or since (together with a 12-episode run on the aforementioned “Ozark,” and welcome dips into comedy on “The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt” and “Divorce,” amongst others). He may fill a go well with or a cop uniform or a set of spurs like no one else, and his face would solely develop extra complicated and engaging to watch with age: balding, bearded, and bullheaded as ever.

But it surely’s a testomony to Yulin’s love and dedication to the craft of performing that he would proceed to discover new angles to play, and new methods to play the angles he’d lengthy mastered, all the way in which till his dying this 12 months. He by no means as soon as considered retiring, as he as soon as admitted in a 2010 interview:

“Retiring isn’t a thought that I can ever entertain. You love what you do and really feel fortunate to be doing it, lastly, fortunate that different individuals may need to see it or show you how to to do it.”