Dan Ziskie appeared in guest spots on House of Cards, Law & Order, St. Elsewhere, The Blacklist, Sex and the City, ER, and elsewhere.
Dan Ziskie, the character actor whose presence lent weight to dramas like Treme and House of Cards and whose timing brightened sketches on Chappelle’s Show, died July 21 in Manhattan. He was 80.
Arteriosclerotic cardiovascular disease was listed in the death notice as the cause.
Born in Detroit in 1944, Ziskie sprinted and jumped at the University of Michigan while majoring in English. He crewed the freighters on the Great Lakes, wrote news copy at small Michigan papers, then joined the Second City troupe in Chicago, sharing the stage with Belushi, Doyle-Murray, and Flaherty.
According to Yahoo, After the Chicago success, Ziskie relocated to New York, making his Broadway bow in 1980 as an understudy in Morning’s at Seven. He later stepped into the New York stage opposite Judd Hirsch in I’m Not Rappaport in 1985.
Ziskie first caught viewers’ eyes in the early ’80s while taking on small guest spots across a handful of series before landing meatier parts in ’85. That year, he shared scenes with Tom Hanks in The Man with One Red Shoe, traded barbs with Christian Slater in Twisted, and took a turn in Robert Altman’s O.C. and Stiggs.
A steady stream of single-episode cameos followed: he helped sell the mystery in Remington Steele, crossed medical paths in St. Elsewhere, lent weight to The Equalizer, dropped into a Newhart season, and showed up in Murphy Brown. Comic relief came in the form of supporting appearances in Adventures in Babysitting and Troop Beverly Hills.
The ’90s widened his canvas. Ziskie stepped back into a suit for Quantum Leap, gave the law a face on Law & Order, and turned a corner as a politician or officer on Ghostwriter. ER and DEA also put him in uniformed command. The big screen brought him The Jackal, alongside Bruce Willis and Richard Gere, where he turned the dial on a ticking clock.
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The 2000s continued the familiar territory. He became the cool authority figure opposite Kevin Costner in Thirteen Days, traded tense glances with Anthony Hopkins and Chris Rock in Bad Company, and braved the storm with Paul Walker in Eight Below. According to IMdb, TV likewise called for ranks of judges, doctors, and officers: judges on Law & Order, doctors on ER, and officers in 24 and NCIS.
A guest spot on Sex and the City gave him the bar-side gravity of a counselor. The light voiced-his half. A matching stride through War of the Worlds and a small role in Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York kept him a familiar shape on the periphery of the frame.
Among his many arrests of memory, Ziskie’s sharp sharp encore during a provocative 2004 Chappelle’s Show sketch never quite leaves the mind: the camera locks on a single blue-glass suburban doorway, he stands stooped beneath that monetary echo of a racial slur, delivers the redneck-wonder truths of a family man too comfortable in his own skin. The line makes a sound like a snapped twig.
The decade that followed let the world watch him assume a quieter, more crucible-light stature. The leavened bulk of C.J. Liquori, a bayou-born construction magnate on Treme, settled Ziskie into 18 episodes of the Crescent City’s slow, singing death march.
Later, a half-dozen neighbors on House of Cards, two words from deus the vice the vaguely presidented. He drifted into Show Me a Hero, Ziegler-logging three, three more on a sudden Zero Hour, then trailers on the good night’s Blacklist, the steadfast Blue Bloods, the evidence-out-good-wife, the ever-willing Madam Secretary.
Mornings on this same planet, he carried a camera the way some of us carry a prayer: shutter, grain, city grain. Cloud Chamber, the 2017 book of subway ghosts and deli owners, stirred the bookshops, and his instant-portraits slipped between the walls of the Times, the Guardian, the Times again, the Financial Times, and other rooftops.
He leaves behind David, brother; Cynthia, sister-in-law; a trio of children, and a wider family who already knew the hush that follows a shutter’s click.