LOS ANGELES -- Daniel von Bargen, who played cops, military men and other tough guys across dozens of movies and TV shows -– including a memorable run as George Costanza’s gruff but incompetent boss Mr. Kruger on the last season of Seinfeld -- has died. He was 64.
Von Bargen died Sunday after a long illness, according to TV station WLWT in Cincinnati, von Bargen's hometown. No other information was available about his cause of death. He had shot himself in 2012, apparently distraught about complications from diabetes.
Von Bargen got his start on TV in the late 1980s in various miniseries and on Spenser: For Hire, and the early 1990s with small roles on soaps Guiding Light and All My Children.
His transition to film began with a small role as a S.W.A.T. communicator on The Silence of the Lambs. That began a long string of roles as police chiefs, district attorneys, Army generals, judges and other authority figures, including the menacing Sheriff in O Brother, Where Art Thou? and Warden Pendleton in Amistad.
But he never left TV, where he had a memorable run on Malcolm in the Middle as Commandant Edwin Spangler. On Seinfeld he was the owner of Kruger Industrial Smoothing, where Costanza worked after his time with the Yankees.