In Remembrance: Robert Pastorelli

     Robert Pastorelli, the actor best known as never-quite-finished-with-the-job house painter Elden on the sitcom Murphy Brown, has passed away on Monday, March 8, 2004. He was 49.

     Born in New Brunswick, NJ on June 21, 1954, Pastorelli early dreams of a career in professional boxing ended after a near fatal car crash on his 19^th birthday. He instead turned his sights to acting and soon found himself in regional productions of Rebel Without A Cause, Death Of A Salesman and The Rainmaker. Heading to Hollywood in 1982, Pastorelli soon found himself playing a variety of streetwise characters in television movies like I Married A Centerfold (1984) and films like Outrageous Fortune (1987) and Beverly Hills Cop II (1987).

     His first big break in 1988 came when he was cast as Candace Bergen’s perfectionist housepainter Elden Bernecky on the sitcom Murphy Brown. Although his character was only supposed to appear in just the first few episodes of the series, Pastorelli so impressed the show’s producers that they decided to keep him on. He stayed with the show for five years.

     Pastorelli continued to appear in films, including supporting roles in Dances With Wolves (1990), Sister Act II (1993) and Michael (1996). In 1997 he returned to television in the crime drama Cracker, based on the British series of the same name about a police psychologist with a fractured family life. In 2001 he appeared in a television movie adaptation of South Pacific as Luther Billis opposite Glenn Close. The two reunited the following year on stage in a London production of A Streetcar Named Desire.

     Pastorelli had just recently finished work on Be Cool, the sequel to the 1995 crime comedy Get Shorty, based on the novel by Elmore Leonard.