American actor and singer best remembered for his roles in the 1970 film M*A*S*H and TV’s Star Trek and Boston LegalThe actor René Auberjonois, who has died aged 79 of cancer, had a distinctive face – beaky, birdlike, inquisitive – and a gift for comic haughtiness. His biggest successes came on television: as well as appearing in guest roles on everything from The Rockford Files to Grey’s Anatomy, Starsky and Hutch to Frasier, he was a regular on three popular and vastly different shows, each of which required him to play variations on his stuffed-shirt persona.
In the sitcom Benson, a spin-off from the irreverent 1970s television hit Soap, he was the prissy, hypochondriac chief of staff to a US governor; he joined the show in its second season in 1980 and remained on board until its cancellation six years later. He was seen throughout the seven seasons of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (1993-99) as Odo, a pebble-faced shapeshifter who could change into anything from a seagull to a spinning top, but whose natural state was a gelatinous mass in a bucket. He was back in his own skin for all five seasons of Boston Legal (2004-08), in which he played a by-the-book partner in a law firm whose daughter is a drug addict.