John Heard in Locusts (2005)
John Heard (March 7, 1945 – July 21, 2017) was an American film and television actor. He was best known for his roles in films such as Cutter’s Way, After Hours, Big, Beaches, Awakenings, Rambling Rose, The Pelican Brief, My Fellow Americans, Snake Eyes, and Animal Factory. He also famously played the weary father in Home Alone and Home Alone 2: Lost in New York.
On television, John Heard’s many appearances included particularly notable roles on The Sopranos (for which he received an Emmy nomination) and later on Battlestar Galactica as Commander Barry Garner.
John Heard’s horror roles began in 1982 with Paul Schrader’s erotically-charged remake of Cat People – in which he is drawn to Nastassja Kinski’s character Irena. He played a lab technician in indie psycho thriller Too Scared to Scream (apparently made in 1982 but unreleased until 1985). Heard then co-starred in cult sci-fi monster movie C.H.U.D. (1984). In 1985 he was a death row inmate who apparently found a portal to another dimension in Tales from the Darkside episode ‘Ring Around the Redhead’.
In 1995, Heard played Montresor in a re-enactment of ‘The Cask of Amontillado for the ‘Edgar Allan Poe: Terror of the Soul’ episode of American Masters. Also in 1995, he took a trip into terrifying space for The Outer Limits episode ‘Dark Matters’.
Ten years later, Heard’s next genre-related appearance was when he faced a deadly swarm of bioengineered insects in TV movie Locusts: Day of Destruction.
He made a cameo appearance as a former alcoholic in the tense, nasty and recommended morality movie Would You Rather (2012), soon followed by a playful role as another man battling a drink problem in the first Sharknado outing – in which he fights off a shark with a bar stool!
He was in The Lizzie Borden Chronicles mini-series (2015) and made one of his final movie appearances in the soon-to-be-released modern vampire tale Living Among Us (2017).
