Dennis Franz, the star of the long-running and highly acclaimed NYPD Blue and a supporting actor in the popular and enduring series Hill Street Blues, turned 80 on October 28. He has had a long and interesting career in Hollywood in film and TV. Before he made his way into Tinsel town, Franz served in the U.S. Army in Vietnam. He served with noteworthy units such as the 82nd Airborne and 101st Airborne and served 11 months in the country. Franz served in reconnaissance during the war and suffered from depression after his service. He described combat as, “…a traumatic, life-changing experience, particularly when losing friends. He was in multiple firefights and sometimes did not know where the bullets came from. He stated, “Having gone through it, having lived through it, it changed my outlook on life.”
Franz goes further in depth with, “You just want to be out of the situation. And, involuntarily, your body just starts doing things that you don’t have control over, just out of fear and nerves and, you know, you just wish you could be any other place in the world except where you are at that moment. And the only way to get out of it is to shoot back and make somebody stop and let me get out of it.” He describes the maturation process of having gone to Vietnam with, “…having gone a young man — a boy, if you will — [and] coming back a young man. It altered my life. It made me take things a lot more seriously. I was very frivolous and irresponsible up until the point that I went there, and it made me look at life a lot more seriously than before,” he told Snyder, adding that he would “not trade his wartime experience for anything.”
He was grateful to have returned home to the United States and upon arrival, he bent over and kissed the ground. Upon returning from Vietnam, he began acting in Chicago at the Organic Theater Company. Franz is a trained Shakespearean actor, however, he got his best and most well-known roles as authority figures, usually cops. He did start as a baseball player in the short-lived Bay City Blues, however, his big break was as Det. Sal Benedetto in Hill Street Blues. His character is corrupt and commits suicide when a scam falters that he was in charge of. He played Det. Benedetto in the 1982-1983 season of the show. He returned in 1985 as Lt. Norman Buntz and stayed on the show until 1987, its final season. His character got his spin-off in a beautiful locale with Beverly Hills Buntz. It lasted one season.
Franz’s career includes having worked on many feature films with high-level directors. These include roles in Brian De Palma films such as The Fury, Dressed to Kill, Blow Out, Scarface, Body Double and Robert Altman films such as A Wedding, A Perfect Couple and Popeye. He played in two Andrew Davis films such as Stony Island and the Gene Hackman-led The Package. Davis is known for his highly acclaimed film The Fugitive. His features include Die Hard 2, Mighty Ducks the Movie: The First Face-Off and City of Angels. He initially played an antagonist to Bruce Willis’s John McClain and eventually helped McClain defeat the terrorists in Die Hard 2. Franz did multiple guest star roles on many different popular shows of their time, such as The A-Team, T.J. Hooker, Riptide, Simon & Simon, Hardcastle, and McCormick, and Hunter, and Matlock. He starred on NYPD: Blue from 1993 to 2005 in which he was awarded a Golden Globe, three Screen Actors Guild Awards and four Primetime Emmys. He is now retired and spends time with his wife and family. Happy Birthday, Det. Andy Sopowicz!
The post Dennis Franz, NYPD Blue actor and Army airborne Vietnam Veteran, turns 80 appeared first on We Are The Mighty.