John Vernon, who earned a measure of cinematic immortality dressing down Delta House as Dean Wormer in 1978's National Lampoon's Animal House, died Tuesday at his home in Los Angeles of complications from heart surgery. He was 72.
Trained as a stage actor, the Canadian-born Vernon was known for playing a series of villainous and tough-guy roles, such as the mayor in 1971's Dirty Harry and a Cuban guerrilla in Alfred Hitchcock's 1969 film Topaz.
He also did extensive voiceover work, starting with the voice of Big Brother in the 1956 big-screen version of George Orwell's 1984.
However, in the minds of countless movie fans, Vernon's crowning achievement was his portrayal of the humorless Dean Vernon Wormer in Animal House--a man whose apparent goal was to make the campus of fictional Faber College as devoid of fun as possible by wiping out the rebel Delta House fraternity.
"Who dropped a whole truckload of fizzies into the swim meet? Who delivered the medical school cadavers to the alumni dinner?" Wormer asks furiously (and rhetorically) in the film. "Every Halloween, the trees are filled with underwear. Every spring, the toilets explode."
Vernon's strait-laced delivery of classic Dean Wormer proclamations such as, "The time has come for someone to put his foot down. And that foot is me," and, "Fat, drunk and stupid is no way to go through life, son," turned the lines into instant quotables.
The latter line in particular would come back to haunt the actor. In an interview on his Animal House experience, Vernon once said, "I can't tell you how many times I've been asked to record people's answering-machine messages saying, 'Fat, drunk and stupid is no way to go through life, son.' "
Perhaps the highlight of Dean Wormer's job in the film is to inform the toga-favoring Deltas, led by Bluto (John Belushi) and Otter (Tim Matheson), that they have been expelled from college after violating their "double-secret probation."
"I'm sure you'll be happy to know that I've notified all your draft boards and told them you are all, all eligible for military service," Wormer states with barely contained glee.
Director John Landis encouraged the younger members of the cast of Animal House to ad-lib in scenes, but gave Vernon no warning, as he wanted an unrehearsed reaction to the antics thought up by Belushi and the gang--for example, when Bluto shoves pencils up his nose as he's being lectured by Wormer.
A straight-faced Vernon rose to the challenge admirably.
Born with the tongue-twisting moniker Adolphus Raymondus Vernon Agopsowicz in Zehner, Saskatchewan, Vernon was the son of a corner grocery store owner. He first became interested in acting in high school and went on to study at the Banff School of Fine Arts in Canada and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London.
The divorced actor is survived by two daughters, Kate and Nan; a son, Chris; stepsons Jim and Grant West; a granddaughter and his brother, Ernest Christopher.
A memorial service was pending.