Engaged Clarkie was one of John Heard’s finest roles

In 1990, actor John Heard played what was probably his best-known role — the father who mistakenly left his youngest son behind on a family trip to Paris, in “Home Alone” (he reprised the role in the 1992 sequel). But his television and film credits number almost 200, and that doesn’t include his extensive theater work. But before he appeared on any stage or screen, Heard — who died on July 21, 2017 — was a Clarkie.

Heard earned a history degree at Clark in 1968, and was heavily involved in the arts on campus, including performing with the Clark University Players Society and the Experimental Theatre for all four year. And he was more than a theater kid. In the 1968 yearbook, his listing in the “Senior Directory” shows someone who was very engaged withthe campus community. On the athletic side, he was a member of the crew team as a freshman and junior (after his death, a fellow rower commented on the Clark Facebook page, “His quick wit always kept us laughing.”), participated in intramurals every year, and served on the Athletic Council and as Class Sports Officer in his first year. He worked on Helicon, a student-run arts and literature journal, for three years, and was inducted into Gryphon, the senior men’s honor society.

And since he was at Clark before Greek life was banned in the early 1070s, Heard was a member of the Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity, and served on the Interfraternity Council as a junior.

John Heard started his career playing serious roles in the theater, mostly off-Broadway. Critics praised his wrenching performance as a disabled and emotionally tortured Vietnam veteran in the 1981 film “Cutter’s Way,” but he gained recognition mainly for lighter roles in films of the 1980s and ’90s like “Home Alone,” in which he played Macaulay Culkin’s father, and before that,“Big,” with Tom Hanks.

Heard made his film debut in 1977 in “Between the Lines,” about a socially conscious alternative newspaper in Boston being taken over by a big company. In a subsequent New York Times interview, when he was performing with The Public Theater in a production of August Strindberg’s “Creditors,” he quipped, “I think this interview is a little premature. I don’t know, maybe after this is over, I’ll go back to Washington and be a plumber’s helper again.”

He had film roles in “Beaches,” “Gladiator” and “The Pelican Brief,” and made television appearances on shows like “Miami Vice,” “NCIS: Los Angeles” and as a corrupt police detective in “The Sopranos,” which earned him an Emmy Award nomination.