Star Wars actor Richard Donat dead at 84: Beloved thespian hailed from iconic showbiz family
Richard Donat, who voiced Deej in the 1980s Star Wars spin-off series Ewoks, has died at the age of 84.
He came from a showbiz family, being the nephew of Oscar-winning British actor Robert Donat and the brother of TV star Peter Donat.
Among his most famous roles was Stephen King’s character Vince Teagues in the Syfy show Haven, set in Donat’s hometown of Nova Scotia.
He was also a fixture on CBC radio in Canada at Christmas time; He could be heard reciting Robert Louis Stevenson’s poem Christmas at Sea.
Donat’s longtime love, Maggie Thomas, and their sons, Owen and Morgan, were by his side when he died on March 28, according to a statement from the funeral home. announcement.
He allegedly suffered from illnesses in the last two years of his life and was treated at a hospital on Nova Scotia’s South Shore, where he had lived since 1989.
Richard Donat, who voiced Deej on the 1980s Star Wars spin-off TV show Ewoks, has died at 84; Filmed at New York Comic Con in 2013
Donat was born in Nova Scotia in 1941 into an artistic family that included his uncle Robert Donat, an acclaimed British actor who starred in classic 1930s films such as The Count of Monte Cristo and Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps.
Robert Donat also starred in the 1939 film Goodbye, Mr., opposite Greer Garson. He won an Academy Award for his role as the school principal in the movie Chips.
Donat’s older brother, by the way, was Peter Donat, who was beloved for starring in the soap opera Flamingo Road in the 1980s and then The X-Files in the 1990s.
Richard Donat broke into the business by becoming a star on stage after graduating from Canada’s National Theater School in 1967.
He played a gay biker who becomes roommates with a drag queen in Michel Tremblay’s groundbreaking play Hosanna, which became a sensation in Montreal in 1973 and opened on Broadway the following year with Donat reprising the role.
He also appeared in a number of Canadian films in the 1970s and 1980s, including the horror film Death Weekend starring Brenda Vaccaro and the oil crisis satire Gas, starring a young Howie Mandel.
In 1985, she voiced the role of Deej in the television cartoon Ewoks, a short-lived Star Wars spinoff that ran for two seasons on ABC.
Her film credits included Kathryn Bigelow’s 2000 drama The Weight of Water, starring Sean Penn and Elizabeth Hurley, as well as the 2009 film Amelia, directed by Zohran Mamdani’s mother, Mira Nair, and starring Hilary Swank as Amelia Earhart.
