The Office Actors You May Not Know Passed Away

Ken Howard appears in only a single episode of "The Office," Season 2's "The Carpet." Howard plays Michael's old boss Ed Truck, who Michael fools into returning to the office by making up a story about an issue with his retirement. The truth is Michael wrongly believes a disgruntled employee has pranked him, and he wants input from Ed. While Howard wouldn't appear again on "The Office" — outside his old photo with a long-haired Michael — the character would have a much greater impact. When Michael learns of Ed's death in Season 3's "Grief Counseling," it forces him to consider his own mortality which leads, of course, to a funeral in the parking lot for a dead bird.

Howard's career reached far beyond his one-off on "The Office." One of his most well-known roles was Coach Ken Reeves on the late '70s/early '80s CBS drama "The White Shadow." Some years earlier in 1972, he impressed audiences with his award-winning performance as Thomas Jefferson in the musical "1776." Other memorable film roles included parts in "Rambo," "Michael Clayton," and "J. Edgar." Howard died in March 2016 at 71 years old due to pneumonia complicated by shingles and prostate cancer.

You may not know the name Ranjit Chowdry, but if you're a fan of "The Office," you have to know the name Vikram. Michael meets Vikram when his financial problems push him to get a temporary gig as a telemarketer in Season 4's "Money." No matter how good he is at selling paper, Michael just can't get the hang of telemarketing, unlike the former surgeon Vikram, who regularly nabs the top salesman position at the Lipophedrine Diet Pill Company. Michael briefly recruits Vikram the following season for the Michael Scott Paper Company in "Dream Team," but leaves when the "investors meeting" (comprised solely of Michael's grandmother and her friends) reveals Michael is unprepared. 

With a career on stage, screen, and film dating back to the late '70s, Chowdry was a busy character actor long before he sold diet pills on "The Office." Chowdry enjoyed prominent recurring roles like Mr. Singh on "Cosby" and Dr. Marvin Gudat on "Prison Break," and numerous one-offs on shows like "Law and Order: Special Victims Unit" and "Girls." Chowdry's work was more prolific in his own country, as noted by Indian actor Rahul Khanna in a tweet calling Chowdry "a towering icon of Indian diaspora cinema and a master of his craft." Chowdry died in April 2020 after emergency surgery to correct a ruptured ulcer. He was 65 years old. 

While he didn't always have many lines of dialogue, Hugh Dane was a memorable part of "The Office" family as Hank Tate, the security guard for Dunder Mifflin's Scranton office. For example, in Season 2's "Drug Testing," it's Hank who swears Dwight into his made-up role on the security team. Hank's the guy whose name no one can remember in Season 4's "Night Out" when they stay late and can't get out of the parking lot. Hank's also the guy selling his particularly unimpressive blues CD for Michael's benefit show in Season 5's "Crime Aid." 

Dane was a well-known character actor in film and television for years, working in the industry since the early '90s. Some of his more memorable roles outside "The Office" include appearances in the comedy movie "Bridesmaids" and the horror film "Joy Ride." Dane passed away from pancreatic cancer in May 2018 at the age of 75, and his death inspired numerous online tributes from "The Office" actors. On Twitter, Steve Carell called Dane a "terrific guy," Mindy Kaling wrote he was "one of the funniest actors ever," and Rainn Wilson named him "one of the greats."

Dunder Mifflin isn't just in the backwater town of Scranton, Pennsylvania — there are branches all over the country. In the Season 2 episode "Valentine's Day" we meet Michael Scott's counterpart from a Dunder Mifflin office located in Buffalo, New York: Regional Manager Dan Gore, played by actor Dan Cole. He returns in Season 3's "Cocktails," where he's scoffed at by Dwight for never having seen "Battlestar Galactica," and he makes a third appearance in Season 4 in "Launch Party."

During his career, which got its start in the 1990s, Cole only made sporadic appearances on screen, with his role as Dan Gore being the only time he played a character more than once. But when he did appear, it was often on some of TV's biggest shows. This includes appearances in episodes of "Arrested Development," "Two and a Half Men," and "Monk" in the 2000s, with guest spots in "Parks and Recreation," "Brooklyn Nine-Nine," and "NCIS: Los Angeles" the following decade.

On the film side, Cole didn't have a long list, but he did make an uncredited appearance as Officer Timm — named for Harley Quinn creator Bruce Timm — in the 2020 Cathy Yan-directed anti-hero adventure "Birds of Prey." Film and TV wasn't his only arena, though — he also performed on stage, with his favorite role being Ebenezer Scrooge in "A Christmas Carol." Cole passed away in 2024 at the age of 60 after a prolonged illness. 

Every company needs a CEO, and for Dunder Mifflin that top executive is Alan Brand, played by actor Alan Fudge. Mentioned throughout the series, Brand shows up just once, in the Season 6 installment "Shareholder Meeting," but he makes his presence felt in a big way. It's in that episode that things go south for Dunder Mifflin, and Michael (Steve Carell) and the gang learn that Brand — the man who claims he can right the ship — has no plan to save the company. We later learn in "Secret Santa" that Brand was fired alongside a number of other senior executives.

The role of Brand was the last on-screen appearance of Alan Fudge's career. Usually a guest star or recurring character on the small screen throughout his career, some of his more notable roles came in episodes of "L.A. Law" in the '80s and '90s, and "How I Met Your Mother" in 2008. Fudge was part of a show's main cast only once, with his largest role coming in the short-lived 1977 series "The Man From Atlantis," one of the weirdest superhero TV shows ever made. Before that, though, he'd shown up in "Wonder Woman," so his comic book credentials aren't all bad. 

Impressively, Fudge's first role came in an episode of one of TV's biggest shows, "Gunsmoke," back in 1972, and he closed out his acting career with voicework in the 2011 video game "Star Wars: The Old Republic." He died of lung and liver cancer that same year at the age of 67.

Some guest actors on "The Office" are bit players, and some don't even receive a name for their character. Such is the case with actor Nick Lashaway, who appeared in the episode "Money," from the show's fourth season. In the episode, Michael Scott gets a second job as a telemarketer, and Lashaway plays one of the young coworkers who become his unlikely friends, though he's only credited as "telemarketer." Tragically, what makes Lashaway's passing notable isn't the fact that he had a role in "The Office," but the fact that he died so young: In 2016, just five years after appearing in "Money," Lashaway lost his life in a car crash in Framingham, Massachusetts.

Though Lashaway was just 28 at the time of his death, he already had a decent career as a bit player. In addition to "The Office" he was also seen in episodes of "Girls," "8 Simple Rules" and even "The X-Files" when he was just 10 years old, playing a young Fox Mulder. Roles in the sci-fi thriller "In Time" (one of Justin Timberlake's better films) and "Ghost of New Orleans" helped prepare him for his starring role in the 2016 indie drama "Prayer Never Fails" from director Wes Miller, which also starred Eric Roberts, Corben Bernsen, and Lorenzo Lamas.

As fate would have it, Lashaway's role in "The Office" was a reunion for him. Two years earlier he'd actually had a small part in Steve Carell's "The 40-Year-Old Virgin." 

In Season 8 of "The Office," receptionist Erin (Ellie Kemper) goes down to Florida and gets a job as a live-in maid. Her boss is Irene, an elderly woman who Erin meets while at the launch of Sabre's new retail store. Irene is played by legendary actor Georgia Engel, who longtime TV fans will know best as Georgette Franklin Baxter on "The Mary Tyler Moore Show." Audiences from the 1990s, though, may remember her as Pat MacDougall from "Everybody Loves Raymond," and more recent viewers probably recognize her as Mamie Sue on "Hot in Cleveland."

During her career, Engel was nominated five times for an Emmy — for "Everybody Loves Raymond" three times and "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" twice — with a nearly 25-year gap in between. But those aren't even her only major roles. In addition, Engel had recurring roles in "Coach" and "Goodtime Girls," as well as "The Betty White Show" and "Passions." In some ways, she might be one of the unsung queens of television, but she had plenty of movie roles too. In fact, some of her most notable movies saw her lending her voice to animated characters. This includes playing the giraffe in "Doctor Dolittle 2" and Bobbie in all three "Open Season" films. She also did voice work in "Hey Arnold!," "Hercules," and "The Care Bears Movie."

In addition to movies and TV, Engel also had a career on stage, appearing in "Hello Dolly!" and "The Drowsy Chaperone," among others. She died in 2019, aged 70.

Not every actor in "The Office" is even a professional performer. The 3rd season episode "Diwali" introduced fans to the parents of Kelly Kapoor, played by Mindy Kaling, who also co-wrote the episode. To play Kelly's parents they recruited none other than Kaling's actual parents, Swati and Avu Chokalingam. According to Kaling, though, it wasn't purely nepotism that got them the roles: auditions were unable to zero in on any experienced actors who were very good. "Now, I'm the first to say that my parents' acting was also very stilted," she told People in 2020. "But [showrunner Greg Daniels] was like, 'At least they bear some familial resemblance to you. So, we'll put them in there.'"

Kaling's mother Swati wasn't an actor, but an OB/GYN, and it was her mother's life as a doctor that inspired Kaling's post-"Office" series, "The Mindy Project," where she too played an OB/GYN. With such a close relationship, it makes sense that Kaling cast her mother to play the role in "Diwali." Curiously, though, despite penning the episode and acting alongside her own parents, Kaling didn't call it her favorite episode that she wrote. Kaling's mother died in January 2012 of pancreatic cancer, with Kaling later becoming an ambassador for the Pancreatic Cancer Action Network.

His character didn't get a name in the episode, but actor Weston Nathanson did get to play the Civil War archivist in Season 8's "Gettysburg." That episode saw the Dunder Mifflin group visiting the historic battleground for some morale-boosting activities, with Nathanson helping to educate them on history. He must have impressed the cast and crew, too, because co-star and writer Mindy Kaling brought him back a few years later to guest star in an episode of her own show, "The Mindy Project."

"The Office" was hardly Nathan's first sitcom appearance, though. As it happens, one of his earliest roles was in a 1999 episode of "The Drew Carey Show," playing the mother of Drew's on-again/off-again girlfriend Kate (Christa Miller). Within a few years, Nathanson was popping up all over the dial, in episodes of "The District," "The King of Queens," and "Scrubs." He also had small film roles in the Joss Whedon sci-fi action-comedy "Serenity" (a movie needed to wrap up the ending of "Firefly") and "The Virgin of Juarez." 

Towards the end of his career, Nathanson could be seen in episodes of "New Girl" and "Speechless," with his final role coming in an episode of the Al Pacino drama "Hunters." He died in 2023, aged 84.

In typical fashion, Michael Scott leads a harebrained scheme in Season 5's "Dream Team" as he hopes to convince a potential investor to fund his latest project. That investor, however, winds up being his own grandmother, and even she isn't so sure his new idea is worth investing in. Nana Scott is played by Connie Sawyer, an actor well-suited for the best comedy of the 2000s because she was once nicknamed "The Clown Princess of Comedy." She lived a remarkable life, too, starting out performing at nightclubs in New York when she was barely old enough to drink. In just her third acting role, Sawyer snagged a part in the Frank Sinatra film "A Hole in the Head," altering her career forever.

From then, Sawyer appeared on TV and at the movies, with theatrical hits like "True Grit," "When Harry Met Sally," and "Dumb and Dumber." By the 2010s she was among the oldest living members of the Screen Actors Guild, a singular title she earned within a few years, and one that she held at the time of her death in 2019. She was a remarkable 105 when she passed on, just two years after her last on-screen appearance. At her advanced age, she is also the only actor on "The Office" to reach the centennial mark.