John Ashton, character actor best known as the tough-cookie veteran in Beverley Hills Cop

As the ‘nagging housewife’ of the film’s mismatched police trio, he struggled to keep a straight face during Eddie Murphy’s improvised riffs

John Ashton, who has died aged 76, was a burly character actor usually cast as cops and tough cookies, to notable comic effect in his two best-known film roles: as a bounty hunter in Midnight Run, and as the long-suffering Sergeant Taggart, both a butt and a buddy of Eddie Murphy’s motormouth detective Axel Foley, in the Beverly Hills Cop franchise.
The first Beverly Hills Cop picture (1984) saw the moustachioed, balding Ashton as the veteran officer saddled with an excitable, ever-wittering younger partner, Billy Rosewood (played by Judge Reinhold). Eddie Murphy was the brash blow-in from Detroit who has gone rogue to investigate a friend’s murder; after disabling their car when they try to arrest him, he subsequently enlists their help.
Ashton’s role in the mismatched trio was, as he put it, that of “the harried husband or nagging housewife”, looking on in horror as Murphy’s Axel Foley left Los Angeles littered with wrecked vehicles as he recklessly pursued the killers. The hardest part of the role, Ashton recalled, was keeping his expression stern when Murphy launched into one of his improvised comic riffs.
In the script (originally written as a serious vehicle for Mickey Rourke before Murphy came on board), Taggart and Rosewood were minor characters. But, as Ashton recalled, “we just started developing a chemistry [with Murphy], and Martin [Brest, the director] saw it and loved it and just kept letting us ad lib and run with scenes, and Judge and I ended up being the co-stars of the film.”
Having helped to propel the picture to become the highest-grossing US film of the year, the trio reconvened for Beverly Hills Cop II (1987), directed by Tony Scott, in which Taggart saves the day by climactically shooting Brigitte Nielsen in a warehouse, although his most memorable scene saw him fall fully clothed into a swimming pool.
Happily for Ashton, he was absent from the witless Beverly Hills Cop III (1994), being committed to filming the baseball comedy Little Big League. After three decades spent trying to get a fourth film off the ground, the trio finally returned earlier this year for the Netflix-streamed Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F, with Ashton’s Taggart still joining in the shoot-outs despite having been promoted to chief of police.
The son of Edward Ashton and his wife Eva, née Wells, John David Ashton was born on February 22 1948 and grew up in Enfield, Connecticut. In 2020 he recalled that he had been “a juvenile delinquent”, set to be sent away to military college at 12, when he turned things around after joining his school theatre group: “It saved my life, probably.”
Married at 19, he worked on freight docks for a year to earn the money to enrol at the University of Southern California School of Theatre. He combined television roles in Kojak, Columbo, Police Story and Dallas with stage work around the world, and won a Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Award in 1973 for his role in A Flea in Her Ear.
After Beverly Hills Cop he was reunited with Martin Brest for another hit action comedy, Midnight Run (1988), in which he found the humour in the role of Robert De Niro’s rival bounty hunter, the world-weary Marvin Dorfler; he made the character so sympathetic that, although killed off in the script, he was reprieved.
Ashton took the lead role in the TV police series Hardball (1989), which NBC scheduled against Dallas on the grounds that it was their best new show of the season: it was inevitably trounced in the ratings and axed, making him wary of television thereafter.
His many other films ranged from the John Hughes-scripted teen drama Some Kind of Wonderful (1987) to Ben Affleck’s thriller Gone Baby Gone (2007).
Twice divorced, John Ashton is survived by his third wife, Robin Hoye, and by two children and three stepchildren.
John Ashton, born February 22 1948, died September 26 2024