A lover of music, particularly opera, Mr. Kimbrough majored in music and theater at Indiana University and later received a master’s degree from the Yale School of Drama.
Moving to New York, he endured the typical struggles of a young actor until he got his big break as Harry, a hard-drinking husband fighting off the lure of the bottle, in the Harold Prince production of “Company,” the celebrated Sondheim musical about a single man, his girlfriends and the couples he knows as they navigate the complexities of loneliness and love in New York City.
In a roundabout way, Mr. Kimbrough found love himself through the production, albeit three decades later. In 2002, years after his divorce in 1991 from his first wife, Mary Jane (Wilson) Kimbrough, an actress he had met at Yale, he married Beth Howland, who had played alongside him in “Company” as an anxiety-ridden bride, and who later found fame as Vera, the flighty diner waitress, on the long-running sitcom “Alice,” which debuted in 1976.
Ms. Howland died in 2015. In addition to his son, Mr. Kimbrough is survived by a sister, Linda Kimbrough, and a stepdaughter, Holly Howland.
Throughout the 1970s and ’80s, Mr. Kimbrough continued to work steadily, appearing on television shows like “Kojak” and in films like “The Seduction of Joe Tynan” (1979), with Alan Alda, while also paying the bills as a wholesome American in television spots for Imperial margarine and Chef Boyardee spaghetti and meatballs.
But it was only with “Murphy Brown,” his son said, that he found the degree of fame where fans recognized him on the street. And his success allowed him to make peace with being typecast as stodgy.
He came to realize that “stuffiness is not dullness,” Mr. Kimbrough told Newsday. “And that gave me a new lease on life.”
