Stargate And X-Files Actor Michael Kopsa Has Passed Away
Michael Kospa - known best for his appearances on shows like Stargate, The X-Files, and Fringe - has died.
Michael Kopsa–a regular television presence in series like Stargate, Fringe, and The X-Files for decades–has died. Deadline reports Kopsa passed away this past Sunday from complications from a brain tumor. He was 66 years old.
News of the actor’s passing first came from his ex-wife Lucia Frangione on Twitter, who posted, “The great Michael Kopsa, my dear friend and the father of my child, Nora, passed away Oct 23 2022 of a brain tumour. He was an incredible stage and screen actor, voice actor, carpenter, musician and painter. Most importantly, he was a loving and richly present father.”
So far, one of the most touching tributes to Michael Kopsa to emerge online comes from Legion actor Mackenzie Gray. The actor revealed that the late Kopsa’s friends would often refer to him simply as “Kopsa,” and that the pair had become friends in high school. You can see Gray’s entire tribute below.
Among other things, Gray writes that Michael Kopsa would sometimes join his rock band THE REKKERZ on stage “to play harmonica and he always knocked it out of the park.” Gray also calls his late friend “an extraordinary man, with chiselled good looks, piercing blue eyes, a voice like Richard Burton’s and an incredible gentleness underneath a passionate Hellenistic passion.”
Michael Kopsa began his screen profession in animation and remained a prolific voice actor for much of his career. His first credited role was in 1979 in the English dubbed version of Mobile Suit Gundam as the hero Char Aznable. He would later lend his voice to other dubbed anime projects like Galaxy Angel and Project ARMS.
Some of Michael Kopsa’s more prominent voice roles included as Takeshi Ooi, Vice President of VT Enterprises, in Death Note; Dr. Hank McCoy aka The Beast in X-Men: Evolution; and the samurai Vex in Ninjago. His final work on an animated series was for the biblical show Superbook.
While Michael Kopsa had chances to make his mark on much bigger projects, he perhaps left his biggest impression on diehard fans of the science fiction series Fringe. Kopsa landed the recurring role of the disturbing Captain Windmark, the chief antagonist of the show’s final two seasons. Windmark is the head of the Observers: a group of emotionless lab-grown people from the future hoping to colonize the past.
Nor was Fringe the only live-action science fiction series in which Michael Kopsa briefly found a home. He appeared a number of times on Stargate SG-I as General Kerrigan as well as on the Season 4 X-Files episode “El Mundo Gira.” He was a regular presence on the anthology series The Outer Limits, and the Stephen King adaptation series The Dead Zone.
Among the long list of Michael Kopsa’s roles are appearances in TV series like Dark Angel, Sliders, Dead Like Me, iZombie, Van Helsing, Highlander, The Magicians, and The Man in the High Castle. He also landed parts in films like 3000 Miles to Graceland, Watchmen, Stealing Sinatra, and 2005’s Fantastic Four.
