Ron Silver, actor was 62

Silver had been undergoing treatment for esophageal cancer for two years. He died today at home in New York. Silver won a best actor Tony in 1988 for "Speed-the-Plow" and was nominated for three Emmys, including for his role as political consultant Bruno Gianelli in "The West Wing." Here is the AP story and his IMDb and IBDb pages. Silver had recently become a darling of the right for morphing their way from the left, and fellow morpher Roger L. Simon pays tribute at Pajamas Media. Excerpt:

We all knew Ron had cancer and most of us, I suspect, had some idea how bad it was. The summer before last (I think it was then) I remember him telling me about his recent operation. He was out for about six hours, he told me, and when he woke up he looked at the doctor and asked her how it went. She told him she couldn’t take out the cancer. It had metastasized. The six hours were for nothing. She had to sew him back up. They gave him about three to four months to live at that point.

My heart went into my toes, but Ron told me that matter-of-factly and then he went on to apologize for not writing some article or other for Pajamas Media and then asked me how I was doing. That was Ron.

We had a close relationship that came from a strange confluence of events. Perhaps the best movie that either of us worked on was the same one. – Enemies, A Love Story. But that wasn’t the real reason – it was politics. We had stayed friends after Enemies, as movie folks sometimes do when they have worked on something together that was successful, critically or commercially. We discussed other projects, but our relationship was fairly superficial then and gradually we drifted apart during the nineties.

Then 9/11 came and Ron and I were thrown together once again. We were 9/11 Democrats. We talked on the phone about our journey and the alienation we were feeling from some our friends, but we didn’t come face-to-face until the Republican Convention of 2004.

Silver co-founded the Creative Coalition.