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Peter White, US soap star who gatecrashed a gay party in The Boys in the Band – obituary
The play debuted in the US in 1968, broke new ground in its depiction of gay men and attracted huge audiences
Peter White, who has died aged 86, was an actor who made his name in US soap operas, notably as the attorney Linc Tyler in All My Children (1974-2005); but his meatiest role was as Alan McCarthy, the married man at the heart of The Boys in the Band, a 1968 off-off-Broadway play that broke new ground in its depiction of the lives of gay men.
Written by Mart Crowley, the play centres around a group of gay men gathered for a birthday party in Manhattan. When it opened at Wyndham’s Theatre in London the following year – with the American cast – John Barber in the Telegraph described it as “a moving experience... an intensive study of personal relationships among nine homosexuals ... [who] are all too aware of fading good looks, broken loyalties, faithless lovers, disappointed hopes.”
White’s character Alan, Barber writes, “believes himself to be sexually ‘straight’ but occasions an explosion of mirth at his quaint idea that if a male is married, he is necessarily heterosexual. After an evening of fascinated slumming, Alan is driven back to his wife, appalled.”
White, speaking in 2008, recalled that “as soon as the play opened, it caused a stir. None of the cast or crew knew what to expect. Then, in less than a week, we got a call from the Theatre Four management to say they had queues forming right around the corner of West 55th Street with people wanting to buy tickets. When the cast got there, we could hardly get near the place.”
Following its London run, White and the rest of the cast reprised their roles in a film adaptation by William Friedkin – whose next two films would be The French Connection and The Exorcist.
Peter White was born in New York on October 10 1937, and attended Northwestern University, Illinois. From there, he studied acting at Yale.
He secured a few small roles before joining the cast of an Australian tour of Neil Simon’s romantic comedy Barefoot in the Park. When the show arrived back in the US, the veteran Hollywood star Myrna Loy signed up, and she and White formed a friendship that lasted until her death in 1993.
“It was she who convinced me to take the part in The Boys in the Band,” White recalled. “My career was stalling a bit, and I was doubtful if the part would help me or jeopardise it further. However, Myrna saw it differently. ‘Peter,’ she said, ‘if you are going to be an actor, you are going to have to take some risks.’ I have a lot to thank her for.”
White went on to appear in the crime drama The Pursuit of Happiness (1971), then played a doctor in 258 episodes of the San Francisco-set TV soap Love is a Many Splendored Thing. He made his Broadway debut in P.S. Your Cat Is Dead, another play that concerned an apparently straight man grappling with gay urges.
By then he had established himself as Lincoln Tyler, the attorney in All My Children,. He also guested on such shows as Cannon, Hill Street Blues, Falcon Crest, Hart to Hart, Dynasty, Knots Landing, NYPD Blue and The West Wing, and between 1985 and 1987 he played Arthur Cates, a big-wheel attorney, in the Dynasty spin-off The Colbys (1985-87).
His TV movies included Eleanor, First Lady of the World (1982), in which he played the Roosevelts’ son James, and Sins of the Past (1984), which featured a young Kim Cattrall. His work on the big screen took in the 1993 romantic comedy Dave, with Kevin Kline as the president’s doppelgänger, the Robin Williams sci-fi comedy Flubber (1997) and the Bruce Willis action thriller Armageddon (1998).
Peter White was unmarried.
Peter White, born October 10 1937, died November 1 2023