Ray Reinhardt

Ray Reinhardt (March 28, 1930 to August 5, 2026) was an American stage, film and television actor, best known as a longtime member of the repertory company of the American Conservatory Theater (ACT) in San Francisco. Over a career of more than six decades he played leading roles from Cyrano de Bergerac to Willy Loman and King Lear, and he was a familiar face in supporting parts on television and in films such as Time After Time and The Hunt for Red October.

He was born Raymond Harald Reinhardt in New York City, the son of Max and Carola Reinhardt, immigrants from Germany. He grew up in the Bronx, where, as he loved to recall, an eighth grade teacher heard him read Shakespeare and told him, "Reinhardt, I say to you, become an actor." He attended DeWitt Clinton High School, an all-boys public school in the Bronx, and graduated in 1948.

Drafted into the United States Army, he got his first break as an actor almost by accident. A few acting classes in New York qualified him for an arts program during basic training at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, and at 21 he played his first role in a production of Golden Boy. After his discharge he used the G.I. Bill to study theater at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art.

Back in the United States he worked with regional companies in Boston, Phoenix and Washington, D.C., including Arena Stage from 1961 to 1964, before landing a role in the Broadway production of Edward Albee's Tiny Alice, starring Sir John Gielgud. Producer and director William Ball saw him in it and invited him to join the repertory company he was forming. That company became ACT, which opened in Pittsburgh in 1965 and moved to San Francisco two years later.

In about 25 years as a company member, Reinhardt took on some of the theater's greatest roles, including Cyrano in Cyrano de Bergerac, Caesar in Julius Caesar and Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire, and he was equally at home in character parts, period plays and whodunits. In ACT's early years the company ran 16 productions in rotation, and actors would race between the Geary Theater and the Marines Memorial, changing costumes on the way. He played opposite a young Annette Bening, who began her career at ACT, as her father in Our Town, as Nick Bottom to her Titania in A Midsummer Night's Dream, and as Maitland in The Chalk Garden. "Ray was generous on the stage and always keenly interested in what everyone else was doing," Bening said after his death.

One ACT story became theater lore. During a 1976 dress rehearsal of Tennessee Williams's This Is (An Entertainment), Reinhardt ran onstage too early with Williams in the audience and saved the scene with an ad lib. Williams laughed, and he liked the exchange so much that he wrote it into the play, and Reinhardt delivered it every night of the run.

On television Reinhardt guest-starred in series including Gunsmoke, Hawaii Five-O, Mannix, Arnie, Hill Street Blues, Matlock, The Bold and the Beautiful, Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Voyager. His films include Time After Time (1979), Cardiac Arrest (1980), Weeds (1987), The Hunt for Red October (1990), The Guardian (1990), Almost an Angel (1990) and Jexi (2019).

After ACT ended its in-house company system, he kept working across Bay Area stages. He played Willy Loman opposite Joy Carlin in a 1993 San Jose Repertory Theatre revival of Death of a Salesman, King Lear for the San Francisco Shakespeare Festival in 2001, and the furniture dealer Gregory Solomon in Arthur Miller's The Price at Aurora Theatre Company in Berkeley in 2005, a performance critic Robert Hurwitt said had "the antic glee of an ancient vaudevillian." He and Carlin, who first acted together in ACT's The Tavern in 1971, last shared a stage in a reading of Mark Twain's The Diary of Adam and Eve at ACT's 50th anniversary in 2017. He kept working as an actor for hire until the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.

Reinhardt was married and divorced twice and had three daughters, Shanti Reinhardt, Lisa Reinhardt and Sarah Forbes. During his ACT years he lived mostly in Parnassus Heights, San Francisco. For his last two decades his partner was stage manager Lois Hansen, and they lived in an apartment across from Lake Merritt in Oakland. He died at home in Oakland on August 5, 2026, at the age of 96. No cause of death was made public.