Peter Donat, Who Played Agent Mulder’s Father on ‘The X-Files,’ Dies at 90
Sad news. Donat appeared regularly on FOX’s best news show…
Peter Donat, the prolific character actor of the stage and screen who appeared in two films for Francis Ford Coppola and portrayed the father of Agent Fox Mulder on The X-Files, has died. He was 90.
Donat died Monday of diabetes complications at his home in Point Reyes Station, Calif., his wife, Maria, told The New York Times.
… Donat was married to Michael Learned, the matriarch of CBS’ The Waltons, from 1956 until their divorce in 1972. They met when both were in the company of the Connecticut Shakespeare Festival. (Also there at the time: Christopher Plummer, Raymond Massey, Roddy McDowall and Hurd Hatfield.)
He and Learned got to know Coppola at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco, and the filmmaker went on to employ Donat as the lawyer Questadt in The Godfather: Part II (1974) and as an attorney in Tucker: The Man and His Dream (1988).
Donat was considered for the role of the consigliere Tom Hagen in the first Godfather, but that part, of course, went to Robert Duvall.
