Star Wars actor Richard Donat dead at 84: Beloved thespian hailed from iconic showbiz family

Richard Donat, who was the voice of Deej on the 1980s Star Wars spin-off TV show Ewoks, has died at the age of 84.

He hailed from a showbiz family as the nephew of Oscar-winning English actor Robert Donat and the brother of soap star Peter Donat.

Among his most famous roles was the Stephen King character Vince Teagues on the Syfy show Haven, which was set in Donat's native Nova Scotia.

He was also a fixture on CBC radio in Canada at Christmastime, when could be heard reading the Robert Louis Stevenson poem Christmas at Sea.

Donat's longtime love Maggie Thomas and their sons Owen and Morgan were at his side when he died on March 28, according to the funeral home's announcement. 

He purportedly suffered from illnesses in the last two years of his life and was treated at a hospital on the South Shore of Nova Scotia, where he has lived since 1989.

Donat was born on Nova Scotia in 1941 to an artistic family that included his uncle Robert Donat, an acclaimed English actor who appeared in such classic 1930s pictures as The Count of Monte Cristo and Alfred Hitchcock's The 39 Steps.

Robert Donat also won an Academy Award for his turn as the titular schoolmaster in the 1939 film Goodbye, Mr. Chips, starring him opposite Greer Garson.

Meanwhile Donat's elder brother was Peter Donat, beloved for acting on the 1980s soap opera Flamingo Road and then in the 1990s on The X-Files.

Richard Donat himself went into the business after graduating from the National Theatre School of Canada in 1967, becoming a star on the stage.

He played a gay biker who becomes roommates with a drag queen in Michel Tremblay's groundbreaking 1973 play Hosanna, which became a sensation in Montreal and then opened on Broadway the next year with Donat reprising his role.

The 1970s and 1980s also saw him land work in a number of Canadian films, such as the horror picture Death Weekend starring Brenda Vaccaro and the oil crisis satire Gas led by a young Howie Mandel.

In 1985 he held a voice role as Deej on the television cartoon Ewoks, a short-lived Star Wars spin-off that ran for two seasons on ABC.

His motion pictures included Kathryn Bigelow's 2000 drama The Weight of Water featuring Sean Penn and Elizabeth Hurley, as well as the 2009 movie Amelia directed by Zohran Mamdani's mother Mira Nair and starring Hilary Swank as Amelia Earhart.

From 2010 until 2015 he held a principal role on Haven, a supernatural drama set on Nova Scotia and led by Emily Rose and Lucas Bryant.

Inspired by the 2005 Stephen King novel The Colorado Kid, the series featured Donat as the local newspaperman Vince Teagues.

The program was filmed and based on the South Shore of Nova Scotia, where Donat had been living full-time since 1989 with his family.

Donat was also a prolific theater actor, starring in such plays as In the Jungle of the Cities by Bertolt Brecht, Fool for Love by Sam Shepard and Driving Miss Daisy by Alfred Uhry, the basis for the film with Morgan Freeman and Jessica Tandy.

Along with Thomas and their sons, Donat's survivors include his four grandchildren Charlize, Nadia, Mira and Taran.