{"id":221081,"date":"2026-01-05T05:32:09","date_gmt":"2026-01-05T05:32:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/221081\/"},"modified":"2026-01-05T05:32:09","modified_gmt":"2026-01-05T05:32:09","slug":"catch-22-little-murders-oz-actor-was-80","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/221081\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Catch-22,\u2019 \u2018Little Murders,\u2019 \u2018Oz\u2019 Actor Was 80"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tJon Korkes, the veteran character actor and acting teacher who worked for director Alan Arkin<\/a> in Little Murders on stage and screen and portrayed the doomed turret gunner opposite him in Mike Nichols<\/a>\u2019 Catch-22, has died. He was 80.<\/p>\n

\n\tHis death was reported by New York\u2019s Stella Adler Studio of Acting, where he taught from 2008 until November. No details were immediately available.<\/p>\n

\n\tKorkes \u201cbrought decades of experience across film, television and theater into the classroom, meeting each student exactly where they were,\u201d said a statement<\/a> from the school. \u201cHe loved teaching, and his students knew it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tIn 1968, Korkes was working as a reader in auditions for Jules Feiffer<\/a>\u2019s off-Broadway production of Little Murders when he was cast by director Arkin to play the brother of Marcia Rodd\u2019s character in the Fred Willard<\/a>-starring black comedy about unrelenting decay in New York City.<\/p>\n

\n\tHe reprised the role of Kenny Newquist alongside Rodd (and other returnees Vincent Gardenia and Elizabeth Wilson as their parents) in the 1971 Fox film version that also was helmed by Arkin and starred Elliott Gould in Willard\u2019s role of a photographer.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn perhaps his most notable part \u2014 though his screen time was limited \u2014 he portrayed the young turret gunner Snowden, whose slow, bloody death haunts Arkin\u2019s bombardier Capt. John Yossarian throughout Catch-22 (1970).<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cNichols and Arkin and Feiffer and all those people started me. They were like the slightly older kids who let me play ball with them, and they showed me things and they didn\u2019t kick me out,\u201d Korkes said in a video on the Stella Adler school website<\/a>. \u201cYou don\u2019t forget that.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tIn other notable \u201970s films, Korkes played an undercover bad guy in Nichols\u2019 The Day of the Dolphin (1973) and a reporter in Billy Wilder\u2019s version of The Front Page (1974), and he showed up in Mark Rydell\u2019s Cinderella Liberty (1973) and Larry Peerce\u2019s Two-Minute Warning (1976) as well.<\/p>\n

\n\tFor television, he appeared on everything from All in the Family to Law & Order: Criminal Intent and recurred as corrections officer Tom Robinson on six episodes of Oz during the HBO drama\u2019s final three seasons (2001-03).<\/p>\n

\n\tBorn on Dec. 4, 1945, Jonathan David Korkes was raised in Marblehead, Massachusetts, where he graduated from Marblehead High School. He made his onscreen debut as a small-time crook in The Out-of-Towners (1970), directed by Arthur Hiller<\/a> and starring Jack Lemmon<\/a> in another movie about a crumbling New York.<\/p>\n

\n\tMeanwhile, he appeared on Broadway in 1969 in The Penny Wars, directed by Barbara Harris<\/a>, and in 1971 in the one-act Unlikely Heroes.<\/p>\n

\n\tKorkes\u2019 r\u00e9sum\u00e9 also included the movies The Outside Man (1972), Between the Lines (1977), Jaws of Satan (1981), Getting Away With Murder (1996), Riding in Cars With Boys (2001) and The Double (2013) and stints on TV on The Mary Tyler Moore Show, The Rookies, The Larry Sanders Show, Homicide: Life on the Street and three Law & Order series.<\/p>\n

\n\tHe also taught a master class for actors in Rio de Janeiro.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Jon Korkes, the veteran character actor and acting teacher who worked for director Alan Arkin in Little Murders…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":221082,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[458,146,85,46,121728,97066,5033],"class_list":{"0":"post-221081","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-celebrities","8":"tag-celebrities","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-il","11":"tag-israel","12":"tag-jack-lemmon","13":"tag-mike-nichols","14":"tag-obituaries"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/221081","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=221081"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/221081\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/221082"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=221081"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=221081"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=221081"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}