René Auberjonois dead – Star Trek actor passes away aged 79 after lung cancer battle

STAR Trek actor René Auberjonois has died aged 79 at his home in Los Angeles of metastatic lung cancer.

Auberjonois was a prolific actor, working for nearly half a century in TV and film. 

He was best known for his roles in "Boston Legal," ";Benson" and "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine".

The actor died Sunday at his home in Los Angeles of metastatic lung cancer, his son Remy-Luc Auberjonois told The Associated Press.

Auberjonois worked constantly as a character actor in several golden ages, from the dynamic heater of the 1960s to the cinema renaissance of the 1970s to the prime period of network television in the 1980s and '90s.

PROLIFIC ACTOR

Each generation knew him for something different.

For film fans of the 1970s, he was Father John Mulcahy, the military chaplain who played straight man to the doctors antics in M.A.S.H. It was his first significant film role and the first of several for director Robert Altman.

For sitcom watchers of the 1980s, he was Clayton Runnymede Endicott III, the hopelessly highbrow chief of staff at a governors mansion on Benson, the ABC series whose title character was a butler played by Robert Guillaume.

And for sci-fi fans of the 1990s and convention-goers ever since, he was Odo, the shape-shifting Changeling and head of space-station security on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.

“I am all of those characters, and I love that”, Auberjonois said in a 2011 interview with the Star Trek website. 

“I also run into people, and they think I’m their cousin or their dry cleaner. I love that, too.”

He played Odo on Deep Space Nine from 1993 until 1998 and became a regular at Star Trek conventions, where he raised money for Doctors Without Borders and signed autographs with a drawing of Odo’s bucket, where the character would store himself when he returned to his natural gelatinous state.

Auberjonois was born in New York in 1940, the son of Fernand Auberjonois, Swiss-born foreign correspondent for US newspapers, and the grandson of a Swiss post-impressionist painter.