Raul Julia, an actor who distinguished himself in classics on Broadway and off and also became a success in Hollywood movies, died yesterday at North Shore University Hospital in Manhasset, N.Y. He was 54 and lived in Manhattan.
The cause was complications of a stroke on Oct. 16, said Alice Siegel, a hospital spokeswoman.
A versatile and fearless performer, Mr. Julia could be dashingly romantic, authoritative or broadly comic with equal facility.
Although he was known to millions of moviegoers as Gomez, the father in the ghoulish comedy "The Addams Family" and its sequel, "Addams Family Values," that role was preceded by a long, rewarding career in the theater. For several decades he was a leading actor with the New York Shakespeare Festival.
In 1971, he won his first fame as the love-struck Proteus in the modern musical version of "Two Gentlemen of Verona." Subsequently he played the title role in "Othello," as well as comic characters like Petruchio in "The Taming of the Shrew" (opposite Meryl Streep). Repeatedly he shattered typecasting, acting in plays by George Bernard Shaw, Noel Coward, Jean-Paul Sartre and Harold Pinter, while also having a major career in Broadway musicals.
Mr. Julia delivered one of his most acclaimed performances in Hector Babenco's 1985 film "The Kiss of the Spider Woman." He played Valentin, the political prisoner, opposite William Hurt.
A man of strong humanistic convictions, he was active in political and social causes like the Hunger Project. He sometimes chose roles for their political content, as in "Romero," a film about Oscar Arnulfo Romero, the liberal archbishop of El Salvador who was assassinated in 1980. His most recent appearance was as Chico Mendes, the Brazilian labor-union martyr, in "The Burning Season," a movie that was broadcast on HBO in September.
Raul Rafael Carlos Julia y Arcelay was born in San Juan, P.R., on March 9, 1940. After graduating from the University of Puerto Rico, he worked as an actor while also performing in a nightclub act. In 1964, he moved to New York, making his debut Off Broadway in a Spanish-language production of Calderon's "Life Is a Dream."
Until he met Joseph Papp, Mr. Julia found it difficult to find roles. His first for the New York Shakespeare Festival under Mr. Papp was Macduff in a Mobile Theater production of "Macbeth." Several years later, still stymied in the advancement of his career, he pleaded with Mr. Papp for work and was hired as a house manager. He then edged his way back into acting.
A major turning point was his performance in the musical of "Two Gentlemen of Verona," which opened at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park and then moved to Broadway. Nightly in the summer, after finishing his role in that show, he would hurry to Central Park to play the fop Osric in the last act of "Hamlet."
Later, he played Orlando in "As You Like It," Edmund the Bastard to James Earl Jones's King Lear (the first time Mr. Julia had played such an unsympathetic character) and on to Othello, in 1979. His Othello was a man of passion as well as a man of action. He also portrayed Prospero in "The Tempest" and the title role in "Macbeth."
One of his most challenging roles was Mack the Knife in Richard Foreman's experimental version of "The Threepenny Opera" at Lincoln Center in 1976. Speaking about that performance, for which he was nominated for a Tony Award, he said he acted with "a constant nervous energy, like a bomb about to explode." In a quick change of pace, he followed that musical with "The Cherry Orchard" for Andrei Serban, playing the boorish landowner Lopakhin.
He worked with ease in musicals and drama, on Broadway and in Shakespeare in the park. On Broadway he starred in the musicals "Where's Charley?" and "Nine," in which he played a film director (a variation on Federico Fellini) besieged by the women in his life. He also had the distinction, such as it was, of playing a heroic garbage man in outer space in "Via Galactica," a Galt MacDermot musical that lasted one night on Broadway. Years later, he led a Broadway revival of "Man of La Mancha."
Mr. Julia took over the title role in the Edward Gorey version of "Dracula," revealing a macabre side later put to good advantage in the "Addams Family" films. In 1980, he co-starred with Blythe Danner and Roy Scheider on Broadway in Harold Pinter's "Betrayal," and five years later he played Sergius in Shaw's "Arms and the Man," with Kevin Kline and Glenne Headly, at Circle in the Square.
Frequently he took time away from his stage career to act in movies. His films included "The Eyes of Laura Mars," "The Escape Artist," Francis Ford Coppola's "One From the Heart," Paul Mazursky's version of "The Tempest," "Compromising Positions," "The Rookie" and "Havana." And in the 1988 television mini-series "Onassis: The Richest Man in the World," he stretched credibility as a tall, handsome Aristotle Onassis.
In the 1990 film "Presumed Innocent," he played Sandy Stern, the lawyer who defended the character played by Harrison Ford.
Once, speaking about acting, he admitted that he did not always know what worked for him. "Sometimes it's an instinct," he said, "sometimes it's an intellectual idea, and you have to be willing to make a fool of yourself." When asked to do something difficult, his response was to plunge in. He would say "I'll do it" and "find out later if I could do it," he added. In reflecting on his career, he always credited Mr. Papp as mentor for giving him "the opportunity to play all those great roles."
His first marriage ended in divorce. He is survived by his wife, Merel Poloway; two sons, Raul Sigmund and Benjamin Rafael; his mother, Olga Arcelay of Puerto Rico; and two sisters, Maria Eugenia Julia of Mexico City and Olga Maria Julia of Valencia, Spain.
