Steve Guttenberg's Police Academy gags defined 1980s comedy for millions of American families.
One of the officers who made those movies unforgettable has now passed away at 75.
Peter Van Norden held a secret Broadway connection to Tom Hanks that most fans are only learning about now.
The Lamp Store Scene Fans Still Quote Forty Years Later
Van Norden died Thursday in a Southern California hospice facility.
His wife, Wendy, was by his side.
He had been battling several health conditions, according to TMZ.
His son, Robert, confirmed the death on Instagram, calling his father "a terrific father, husband, friend."
Millions of Americans know Van Norden without ever learning his name.
He played Officer Vinnie Schtulman in 1985's Police Academy 2: Their First Assignment, the slobby cop paired with Steve Guttenberg's Carey Mahoney.
The lamp store scene from that film is still one fans bring up decades later.
Six years after that, he stepped into The Naked Gun 2½: The Smell of Fear as a parody version of George H.W. Bush's chief of staff, John Sununu.
Reagan and Bush era comedy does not get more quotable than that.
Van Norden was not just the guy from the funny cop movies either.
He played an attorney in The Accused, the 1988 drama that won Jodie Foster her first Best Actress Oscar.
He turned up on Cheers, T.J. Hooker, St. Elsewhere, Family Ties, L.A. Law, and Murder She Wrote.
Soap fans caught him on Days of Our Lives.
His last television credit came in a 2019 episode of 9-1-1.
A Broadway Career Most Fans Never Saw Coming
In the fall of 2016, Van Norden became the first American actor to originate the title role in Mike Bartlett's King Charles III at Arizona Theatre Company.
Two years after that, Shakespeare Center of Los Angeles handed him an even higher-wire assignment.
He was named Tom Hanks's official understudy for Falstaff in a 2018 staging of Henry IV, one missed performance away from carrying a sold-out house opposite a movie star.
His Broadway resume includes St. Joan, Macbeth, Little Johnny Jones, Romeo and Juliet, and The Inspector General.
Off-Broadway, he performed alongside Kevin Kline, Al Pacino, Meryl Streep, and Sam Waterston, including two separate runs of Hamlet with Waterston and Kline.
His regional theater work ranged from Ben Franklin to Shylock to Scrooge to Don Quixote, a resume most working actors never come close to matching.
Los Angeles Times theater critic Charles McNulty once wrote that seeing Van Norden's name in a playbill meant the evening would include "another Van Norden master class."
Van Norden kept working almost until the end, appearing in a 2025 Los Angeles production of Corktown '39.
Fifty Years Bouncing Between Slapstick and Shakespeare
Peter Van Norden never had his name above the title.
He did not need one.
The same man clowning through a lamp store shootout in Police Academy 2 stood in the wings ready to play Falstaff for Tom Hanks, and spent fifty years treating both jobs like they mattered.
That is what a real career in this business used to look like, before everything got reduced to a highlight reel and a follower count.
For an audience that remembers when actors built careers instead of personal brands, that is worth pausing on.
Sources:
- Peter Van Norden, "Peter Van Norden, 'Police Academy 2' & 'The Naked Gun 2½' Actor Was 75," Deadline, July 11, 2026.
- Peter Van Norden, "'Police Academy' Star Peter Van Norden Dead at 75 Following Illness," Daily Caller, July 11, 2026.
- Peter Van Norden, "'Police Academy' Star Peter Van Norden Dead at 75," TMZ, July 10, 2026.
- Peter Van Norden, "'Police Academy 2' and 'The Naked Gun 2½' Actor, Dies at 75," FOX 4 Dallas-Fort Worth, July 11, 2026.
- Peter Van Norden, "Peter Van Norden Dead: 'Police Academy 2' Actor Was 75," The Hollywood Reporter, July 10, 2026.
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