Steven Gilborn, Stage and Television Actor, Dies at 72

By MARGALIT FOX
Published: January 12, 2009

Steven Gilborn, a ubiquitous stage, film and television actor best known for his role as Ellen-DeGeneres’s sweet, befuddled father on the TV sitcom “Ellen” in the 1990s, died on Jan. 2 at his home in North Chatham, N.Y. He was 72.

The cause was cancer, his family said.

Mr. Gilborn appeared in scores of other television shows, including “The Wonder Years,” “Law & Order,” “The West Wing” and "NYPD Blue.” His film credits include “The Brady Bunch Movie” (1995) and “Nurse Betty” (2000).

Among his stage credits are Prospero in “The Tempest” and Benedick in “Much Ado About Nothing” at the Folger Theater in Washington; and Moe Axelrod in Clifford Odets’s “Awake and Sing!” at the McCarter Theater in Princeton, N.J.

Steven Neil Gilborn was born on July 15, 1936, in New Rochelle, N.Y. He earned a bachelor’s degree in English from Swarthmore and, in 1969, a Ph.D. in dramatic literature from Stanford. (His dissertation, “The Family Plight in the Plays of Émile Augier,” was a psychoanalytic study of the 19th-century French dramatist.) Before embarking on an acting career in 1970, Mr. Gilborn taught at the University of California, Berkeley; the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and Columbia University.

Mr. Gilborn is survived by his wife, Karen Halverson; two daughters, Laelia Gilborn of Washington and Marya Gilborn of Manhattan; two brothers, Jeffrey of Cranston, R.I., and Craig of Mount Tabor, Vt.; and four grandchildren.