Beau Starr passed away peacefully on Friday April 24 2026 in Vancouver Canada of natural causes at the age of 81 — and the community of fans that has kept Halloween 4 and Halloween 5 alive across nearly four decades of October rewatches, and the devoted following that Due South built and never lost across four beloved seasons of Canadian television, are mourning together today the loss of a man whose face they knew and trusted and whose presence in any production they appeared in immediately made everything around him feel more real.

As Sheriff Ben Meeker in Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers and Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers, Beau Starr gave the franchise something it desperately needed and rarely gets right — a lawman so genuinely decent and so completely believable that his inevitable collision with Michael Myers carried actual weight, the kind of performance that horror fans remember not for the screaming or the special effects but for the quiet authority of the man standing in the monster’s path. His most significant television role came as Lieutenant Harding Welsh on Due South, the beloved odd-couple cop show about a Canadian Mountie partnering with the Chicago police force, which ran for four seasons from 1994 to 1999 and in which Beau appeared in every episode but one. His Goodfellas co-star Christopher Serrone announced his passing with a tribute that captured everything the people who knew Beau Starr want the world to understand: “Beau enjoyed a rich and meaningful life. He was a son, brother, father, grandfather, actor and NFL/CFL player. Please take a moment to help me remember a great guy.” A great guy. In a world that produces legends and icons and stars by the thousand, that is sometimes the rarest and most permanent thing a person can be.