Dakin Matthews’ Crowning Achievement? A Life Fulfilled

In the mid‑1960s, Dakin Matthews walked away from the Church and then, years later, from the university—the two safest institutions a young man could choose—and kept on walking.

First, though, he went to Rome.

He was studying for the priesthood at the Pontifical North American College during Vatican II, when the Church was revising itself for the modern world. From the Janiculum Hill, St. Peter’s dome filled his dorm-room window. He was young, serious, and, by his own account, good at it. The path ahead was orderly. Ascendant. Clear.

Then someone suggested staging Henry IV.

“That’s actually when I started working on Henry IV, Part 1. That was sixty years ago,” Matthews said. He directed. Then he acted. In the theater, he felt something theology had promised him: language that mattered because people were listening. As in the pulpit, interpretation carried consequence. Only here, how it landed was his to decide.

He returned to California and, instead of taking vows, started taking attendance.

After earning his master’s degree in English at Cal State Hayward—now Cal State East Bay—the university hired him. “I finished my English master’s degree in ’66. The next year they hired me as a lecturer,” he said. “I figured I would be a teacher for the rest of my life.” He was twenty‑four.

He taught grammar at eight and Shakespeare by noon. “They had to actually experience the act of saying language on the stage.” Meaning didn’t sit politely on the page. It arrived in the body. His students would stumble into epiphany. Matthews decided he wanted in.

So he drove. In a 1971 Volkswagen, from Hayward to Marin, San Francisco, San Jose, Los Gatos—wherever they would cast him. “I was sort of doing both,” he said. “For all twenty years, basically.” Teaching by day. Rehearsing by afternoon. Performing by night.

Cal State let him. “They considered all my theater work to be professional activity, like publishing.” They encouraged him to go. And so he did.

After nearly twenty‑five years at Cal State, he took early retirement—another leap of faith, this time without the safety net of tenure.

Eventually, he became the man you recognize but can’t quite place. The judge. The professor. The steady face in the second act. Later, that face would appear on The West Wing, Gilmore Girls, and Desperate Housewives. He would show up on Broadway in Rocky, Camelot, and Waitress. He would sing five unrelated notes in a film with Barbra Streisand. “I think I sang them very well,” he said.

He spent twenty years onstage before ever stepping in front of a television camera. “You put in your time,” he said.

Through it all, there was Henry IV.

At its simplest, the two‑part play is about a king who wins the crown and loses sleep. He has taken power by overthrowing another man. The crown is his. Peace is not. Matthews kept returning to the role—or rather, the role kept returning to him. “Each time I change it a little bit.”

Since Rome, he had made it his mission to merge the two plays into a single evening, laboring over structure and meaning until they became one. He carried the production from California to New York, Chicago, Denver, Seattle, North Carolina, and finally Brooklyn.

In the spring of 2025, nearly sixty years after first staging it in Rome, he played Henry again—seven shows a week, three and a half hours a night. “It’s going to take it out of me.”

In between productions, he returned to his theological roots, writing about the Corpus Christi hymns by Thomas Aquinas, reading the Latin closely, tracking meter and rhyme. “If you get bit by the theology bug,” he said, “it sort of never goes away.”

By then, Matthews was eighty‑four, with a career spanning six decades. He kept an apartment in Manhattan and a life in Los Angeles. He had taught at Juilliard, co‑founded the Acting Company, and served on its board. He had left Cal State to pursue acting full time and, to his surprise, made a living at it.

In the winter of 2025, when the curtain fell in Brooklyn, there was no farewell speech. “You don’t tell the audience, ‘By the way, that’s it for me,’” he said. “You just walk away.”

And then he did.