‘Hill Street Blues,’ ‘Doogie Howser’ Actor Was 90

James Sikking as Lt. Howard Hunter on ‘Hill Street Blues’

Courtesy of Everett Collection

James B. Sikking, the Steven Bochco favorite who portrayed the no-nonsense Lt. Howard Hunter on Hill Street Blues and the good-hearted doctor dad on Doogie Howser, M.D., has died. He was 90.

Sikking died Saturday at his Los Angeles home of complications from dementia, publicist Cynthia Snyder announced. 

Although best known for his TV work, Sikking did have notable turns on the big screen as a mocking hitman in John Boorman’s Point Blank (1967), as the stuffy Captain Styles in Leonard Nimoy‘s Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (1984) and as the director of the FBI in Alan J. Pakula’s The Pelican Brief (1993).

After spending the better part of two decades showing up on such shows as The Outer Limits, Honey West, The Fugitive, Hogan’s Heroes and Mannix, Sikking was cast as the pipe-smoking Hunter, leader of the SWAT-like Emergency Action Team, on NBC’s Hill Street Blues.

Bochco, who created the series with Michael Kozoll, afforded Sikking the opportunity to shape his character, and the actor based Hunter on a drill instructor he had encountered during basic training at Fort Bragg in North Carolina.

“The drill instructor looked like he had steel for hair and his uniform had so much starch in it, you knew it would [stand] in the corner when he took it off in the barracks,” he said in a 2014 interview with The Fresno Bee. “So when I started to play Howard, I picked out the way he should be dressed. It had to be a very military look.”

Sikking appeared on 144 episodes across all seven seasons (1981-87) of the acclaimed drama and received an Emmy nomination in 1984.

Bochco turned to Sikking again for Doogie Howser, and he played Vietnam veteran turned family practitioner David Howser, husband of Belinda Montgomery’s Katherine and dad of Doogie (Neil Patrick Harris), on all four seasons (1989-93) of that ABC show.

He then portrayed a cop again for Bochco on Brooklyn South, which lasted one season (1997-98) on CBS.

One of five kids, James Barrie (named for the Peter Pan author) Sikking was born in Los Angeles on March 5, 1934. His mother, Sue, founded the Unity by the Sea Church in Santa Monica in gratitude after she recovered from a nearly fatal automobile accident. His father, Art, followed his wife into the ministry.

Sikking attended El Segundo High School and, after military service, graduated from UCLA in 1959 with a theater degree. He then appeared on episodes of Perry Mason and Assignment: Underwater in 1961 and later in films including The Carpetbaggers (1964), Von Ryan’s Express (1965) and In Like Flint (1967).

Sikking worked on a 1971 episode of NBC’s Name of the Game on which Bochco served as a story editor and then guest-starred on the CBS shows Delvecchio and Paris and as a regular on NBC’s Turnabout — those three were written by Bochco, too — before embarking on Hill Street Blues.

“I’d done acres of crap,” he said of joining Hill Street in 2006. “This was special.”

(Later, he showed up as Hunter on Bochco’s ill-fated ABC series Cop Rock in 1990.)

From 1971-76, Sikking played Jim Hobart, a surgeon with a drinking problem, on the ABC soap General Hospital, and he was the distant father of Jim Carrey in the acclaimed 1992 Fox telefilm Doing Time on Maple Drive.

He got hired for his one-day gig on The Search for Spock through an offer from producer Harve Bennett, his onetime UCLA classmate.

Sikking’s film résumé also included The New Centurions (1972), The Magnificent Seven Ride! (1972), Scorpio (1973), Capricorn One (1977), The Electric Horseman (1979), The Competition (1980), Ordinary People (1980), Outland (1981), The Star Chamber (1983), Narrow Margin (1990), Final Approach (1991), Fever Pitch (2005) and Made of Honor (2008).

And he appeared twice on HBO’s Curb Your Enthusiasm in 2004.

Sikking was devoted to raising funds for cystic fibrosis and the Susan G. Koman Foundation, and through the SAG Book Pals program, he read to public school third-grade classes for 19 years and was affectionately known as “Jim the Reader.”

Survivors include his second wife, Florine, an author whom he met at UCLA and married in September 1962; children Emily and Andrew; and grandchildren Lola, Gemma, Hugh and Madeline.