Bain Boehlke, a prolific veteran Minneapolis actor who appeared in the Coen brothers’ Oscar-winning film Fargo, has passed away.
Videos by Suggest
Boehlke, a fixture in the Twin Cities theater scene for decades, died on Sept. 11, according to The Minneapolis Star Tribune. The actor was in a Minneapolis hospice for the second time after an aggressive cancer returned, per the outlet.
Boehlke was born in northern Minnesota in 1939. A lover of theater since childhood, Boehlke joined the Children’s Theatre Company in 1965 after attending the University of Minnesota. He spent over a dozen years with the company, rising to associate artistic director.
The Tribune noted an acting highlight with the Children’s Theatre Company in a production of Cinderella. Boehlke appeared in the play as the wicked stepmother.
“I remember the first time I saw him in ‘Cinderella,’” his niece Alice Chalupsky told the outlet. “I knew that he was my uncle under all that makeup, but I could not stop laughing.”
Boehlke went on to co-found Minneapolis’ Jungle Theater in 1991, fostering generations of stage actors.
Meanwhile, Boehlke also left his mark in the world of film. According to The Minnesota Star Tribune, He produced a 1982 documentary about Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a theologian, pastor, and anti-fascist executed by the Nazis.
However, film fans will not doubt recall his small but unforgettable scene in the 1996 film Fargo. In maybe one of the most authentic scenes of Minneapolis small talk ever put to film, Boehlke’s snow-shoveling bartender character tells a very pregnant police chief, Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand, who won an Academy Award for Best Actress for the role), that a suspect she’s tracking (played by Steve Buscemi) is funny-looking, “just in a general kinda way.”
The beloved actor earned the McKnight Foundation’s Distinguished Artist Award in 2009.
Bain Boehlke was 87.