'All My Children' Star Peter White Dead at 86

Peter White, the actor best known for playing Lincoln Tyler on All My Children and in multiple adaptations of The Boys in the Band, has died. White died of melanoma at his Los Angeles home on Wednesday, Nov. 1, his former costar Kathleen Noone told The Hollywood Reporter. White was 86.

Born in New York City on Oct. 10, 1937, White was a graduate of Northwestern University from the School of Communications and studied acting at the Yale School of Drama, per Deadline. He began his decades-long acting career on the stage when he joined the cast of The Secret Storm in 1965. It was while was on a touring production of Barefoot in the Park that he was called to join the stage production of The Boys in the Band, becoming part of the original 1968 cast of the hit Off-Broadway play. White starred as Alan McCarthy, a sexually ambiguous man, during a time when most gay characters were either subtextual or demonized. He reprised the character Mart Crowley's The Boys in the Band film adaptation in 1970.

"Opening night, none of us knew what we had," White said of the stage production in a 2008 interview. "We all just thought, 'It's a play, it's something new, it's different and it's good.' It was a 100 percent gay audience – and then the next day, it went crazy! We got a call to come to the theater early, because there was such a crowd around the theater, you couldn't get near it. Everyone at the time wanted to call it a gay play – [I always thought] it wasn't [so much] a gay play [as] it was a play with gay characters."

White was also well-known in the world of soap operas, first starring as Jerry Ames on CBS' The Secret Storm from 1965 until 1966. He went on to guest star on an episode of N.Y.P.D. in 1968 and later portrayed Dr. Sanford Hiller on CBS' Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing in 1971. In 1974, he became the third actor to portray Lincoln Tyler, son of stern Pine Valley matriarch Phoebe Tyler (Ruth Warrick), on All My Children. He first appeared on the show from 1974 until 1980, returning in 1981, 1984, 1986, 1995 and 2005.

White's other TV credits include Cannon, Hill Street Blues, The Jeffersons, Dynasty, Knots Landing, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Mad About You, The X-Files, The West Wing, and Cold Case. On the big screen, he appeared in Dave (1993), Mother (1996), Flubber (1997), Armageddon (1998), Thirteen Days (2000), and First Daughter (2004).