Out gay actor who voiced Cogsworth in Beauty and the Beast and starred in MASH dies

David Ogden Stiers, out gay actor best known for his roles as Major Charles Emerson Winchester III on MASH and Cogsworth in Beauty and the Beast, has passed away. The Juilliard trained, Emmy nominated and Grammy winning actor died in his own home after a long battle with cancer.

After becoming a regular performer on Broadway, Stiers found work as a voice actor. His work on Beauty and the Beast lead to roles in classic animated films The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Pocahontas and Spirited Away.

Stiers only came out as gay in 2009, after being told by the industry to remain in the closet to preserve Disney’s family-friendly image.

“I enjoy working and even though many have this idealistic belief that the entertainment industry and studios like Walt Disney are gay friendly…” he said. “For the most part they are, but that doesn’t mean for them that business does not come first. It’s a matter of economics.

“From the late 1980s until about seven or eight years ago, you would find certain individuals coming up to you, me, and advocating the position that since we were doing family fare that it would be best were the actors to maintain a certain palatability to parents. These parties likely had heard rumours or harboured suspicions about me and wanted to make sure no embarrassing incidents were forthcoming.

“Cogsworth, the character I did on Beauty and the Beast, could be a bit flamboyant on screen, because basically he is a cartoon,” Stiers continued. “But they didn’t want

Cogsworth to become Disney’s gay character, because it got around a gay man was playing him.”

Although Stiers later said he hadn’t found homophobia to be much of an issue in Hollywood anymore: “I should say in regards to this that many of my fears were in modern times self-invented,” he said. “I’ve been working internally on whether they were the problem, or if I just continued using them as an excuse long after the call for conservative private lives passed.”

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