Celebrity Biographies
john mahon
He specialized in playing police officers and leaves behind an extensive filmography. John Mahon died of natural causes at his Los Angeles residence on May 3, 2020, as confirmed by Joseph, one of his two children.
Born on February 3, 1938 in Scranton, Pennsylvania, when he was 12 years old, John Patrick Mahon (his full name) contracted polio, for which he spent almost nine months totally paralyzed. He never regained full use of his left arm. He studied classical languages and English literature at the University of Scranton, where he met later playwright and actor Jason Miller , with whom he was destined to collaborate several times. After graduating he moved to New York.
He played a priest, the director of a language lab that Father Karras (his friend Miller) turns to, in The Exorcist . But almost all of his characters carried a badge and a gun, as John Mahon was a sergeant in Basement of Fear , a detective in Sad Song of Hill Street , a police chief in LA Confidential , and a captain in Zodiac .
Divorced from Dreide, he joined Margaret Jean Street, mother of his two offspring, in 1986. John Mahon also lavished himself on the Broadway stage, where, for example, he was part of the cast of a production of “Ricardo III”, along with Al Pacino , and directed versions of texts such as “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”. In 2014 he wrote “A Life of Make Believe: From Paralysis to Hollywood”, his memoir.