A Quick Tribute to Severn Darden, Character Actor

To those of us in Generation X, character actor Severn Darden is probably most recognizable in minor roles as college professors in two 1980s campus comedies: Real Genius and Back to School. But if not those, then possibly from seeing him either in the original Planet of the Apes movies or in the silly 1981 horror movie spoof Saturday the 14th. However, Darden had a longer and more impressive career than those roles would imply. 

Severn Darden was born in New Orleans, Louisiana in 1929, the son of an attorney. He later attended the University of Chicago then was a founding member of the now-famous Second City improv group that has produced many Saturday Night Live! stars. A September 1961 New York Times review of one Second City show called Darden “an especially gifted and versatile comedian.” Less than a year later, in May 1962, the Times was calling attention to “Fresh Faces On and Off Broadway” and listed him among Cicely Tyson, Peter Fonda, and James Earl Jones as ones to watch. Though it was a lesser-known film, I think of Darden as the wily villain in the 1971 western Hired Hand, the one who gets shot in the feet and legs by Peter Fonda’s and Warren Oates’s characters as he lays in bed.

In the realm of Southern movies, Darden was in 1972’s The Legend of Hillbilly John, 1976’s Jackson County Jail, and 1981’s Soggy Bottom USA. In Hillbilly John, he played Dr. Marduke, a mystical figure who seems to appear whenever he is needed. At the end of the film, John’s love interest Lily asks if he is the Marduk from the Bible, and he replies no, that it was all a bunch of confusion, he had left Babylon long before any of that stuff happened. Jackson County Jail brought him a completely different role, cast as the small-town sheriff in a story where a woman driving across the country is arrested and sexually assaulted in her jail cell. The last of the three, Soggy Bottom USA, was an offbeat comedy that had him in the role of Horace Mouthamush, playing alongside Southern-movie mainstays Dub Taylor and Anthony James. (James was the late-night cafe guy who ended up being the secret culprit in In the Heat of the Night.)

 Severn Darden died thirty years ago today, on May 27, 1995. His New York Times obituary remarked, “Mr. Darden was widely recognized in the world of improvisational theater as a comic genius whose wacky portrayals of a German know-it-all professor and a nitpicking expert on everything under the sun influenced two generations of comic performers.”