Beau Starr, Halloween franchise and Goodfellas actor, dies at 81

Beau Starr built a durable career as the kind of supporting actor who keeps franchises believable, returning to the Halloween series as Sheriff Ben Meeker and giving Michael Myers’s world a grounded civic authority that fans remembered long after the credits rolled. He died on Friday, April 24, 2026, in Vancouver, Canada, at 81.

His brother, actor Mike Starr, said Beau Starr passed peacefully of natural causes. Public biographical listings place his birth in September 1944, matching his age at death. Starr’s career was defined less by stardom than by repeatability: he was the familiar face audiences could trust in a horror sequel, a crime drama, or a long-running television series.

Starr is best known for playing Sheriff Ben Meeker in Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers in 1988 and Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers in 1989. In a franchise that has survived across generations, reruns, home video, streaming and annual October viewing habits, characters like Meeker matter because they stabilize the world around the mask. The Halloween films have endured in part because they built a recognizable small-town ecosystem around Michael Myers, and Starr’s sheriff became one of its most durable figures.

He also spent years on Due South, playing Lt. Harding Welsh on the NBC series from 1994 to 1999. That run gave Starr a different kind of long-tail recognition, one built not on leading-man billing but on consistency, authority and audience familiarity. For television viewers, he was the kind of performer who made a show feel inhabited rather than staged.

Starr’s credits also included Goodfellas, where he appeared in Martin Scorsese’s 1990 crime drama. Taken together, those roles show how character actors can move between horror, prestige crime filmmaking and network television while remaining essential to each. Starr’s death closes the career of a performer whose work helped sustain two forms of American pop culture with unusually loyal fan communities: the slasher franchise and the ensemble drama.