James B. Sikking, the American actor who played two great characters in Steven Bochco created series in the no-nonsense Lt. Howard Hunter on Hill Street Blues and the good-hearted doctor dad on Doogie Howser, M.D., has died. He was 90. Sikking died Saturday at his Los Angeles home of complications from dementia, publicist Cynthia Snyder announced. 

Although best known for his TV work, Sikking did have notable turns on the big screen as a mocking hitman in John Boorman’s Point Blank (1967), as the stuffy Captain Styles in Leonard Nimoy‘s Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (1984) and as the director of the FBI in Alan J. Pakula’s The Pelican Brief (1993). After spending the better part of two decades showing up on such shows as The Outer Limits, Honey West, The Fugitive, Hogan’s Heroes and Mannix, Sikking was cast as the pipe-smoking Hunter, leader of the SWAT-like Emergency Action Team, on NBC’s Hill Street Blues.

One of five kids, James Barrie (named for the Peter Pan author) Sikking was born in Los Angeles on March 5, 1934. His mother, Sue, founded the Unity by the Sea Church in Santa Monica in gratitude after she recovered from a nearly fatal automobile accident. His father, Art, followed his wife into the ministry. After military service, graduated from UCLA in 1959 with a theater degree. He then appeared on episodes of Perry Mason and Assignment: Underwater in 1961 and later in films including The Carpetbaggers  (1964), Von Ryan’s Express (1965) and In Like Flint (1967). From 1971-76, Sikking played Jim Hobart, a surgeon with a drinking problem, on the ABC soap General Hospital, and he was the distant father of Jim Carrey in the acclaimed 1992 Fox telefilm Doing Time on Maple Drive.

Sikking appeared on 144 episodes across all seven seasons (1981-87) of the acclaimed drama and received an Emmy nomination in 1984. Bochco turned to Sikking again for Doogie Howser, and he played Vietnam veteran turned family practitioner David Howser, husband of Belinda Montgomery’s Katherine and dad of Doogie (Neil Patrick Harris), on all four seasons (1989-93) of that ABC show. He then portrayed a cop again for Bochco on Brooklyn South, which lasted one season (1997-98) on CBS.  He got hired for his one-day gig on The Search for Spock through an offer from producer Harve Bennett, his onetime UCLA classmate. He was a good friend of the film’s director and co-star, Leonard Nimoy, with whom he worked a number of times.

Survivors include his second wife, Florine, an author whom he met at UCLA and married in September 1962; children Emily and Andrew; and grandchildren Lola, Gemma, Hugh and Madeline.