R.I.P. John Ashton, Beverly Hills Cop’s short-tempered Sergeant Taggart

John Ashton has died. Ashton’s manager, Alan Somers, confirmed to The Hollywood Reporter that the Beverly Hills Cop star died on Thursday. No official cause of death has been announced. He was 76.

Ashton was a prolific character actor who starred in over 200 productions on stage and screen. Perhaps best known as Sgt. Taggart in Beverly Hills Cop, Ashton provided the ascendant movie star Eddie Murphy with the proper grounding of a police officer frustrated by the hotshot out-of-towner. The film was an enormous hit, becoming one of the most influential action comedies ever, thanks partly to Ashton’s grounding the comedy in a street-cop milieu. He appeared in the first two Beverly Hills Cop movies and returned for Netflix’s recent legacy sequel, Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F.

“The original script was very serious,” Ashton told CBR. “When Eddie took it over, you started adding humor to it, but we kept the edginess, so the story is still there.

Retaining the edginess for another landmark action comedy, Ashton reunited with his Beverly Hills Cop director, Martin Brest, for 1986’s Midnight Run, starring Robert De Niro and Charles Grodin. Playing Marvin Dolfer, one of the “dumbest bounty hunters alive” who couldn’t “deliver a bottle of milk,” Ashton again grounds the frantic, madcap plot with palpable frustration and resentment.

Born on February 22, 1948, in Springfield, Massachusetts, John Ashton attended the University of Southern California School of Theater before jumping to television. Once on the small screen, Ashton made the rounds of ’70s staples, appearing on Kojak, Columbo, Barnaby Jones, and M*A*S*H. Toward the end of the decade, he landed a short run on Dallas and the film and television adaptation of Breaking Away. During that time, Ashton was collecting credits, playing cops and coaches in The Psychopath, Honky Tonk Freeway, and The Adventures Of Buckaroo Banzai Across The 8th Dimension.

In 1984, he starred in Beverly Hills Cop as Sgt. John Taggart, leading to a successful career as a reliable Hollywood character actor. He starred in the John Hughes-penned Some Kind Of Wonderful as the blue-collar father of Eric Stoltz before appearing in the Hughes-directed films She’s Having A Baby and Curly Sue. Throughout the ’90s and 2000s, he continued in Hollywood, acting in Little Big League, Gone Baby Gone, and Instinct.

Ashton is survived by his wife, Robin Hoye, two children, three stepchildren, a grandson, two sisters, and a brother.