John Heard, star of 'Home Alone' and 'Big,' dies

Actor John Heard, best known for playing Macaulay Culkin's dad in the Home Alone movies, died Friday.

Inspector Andrea Whelan with the Santa Clara County, Calif., coroner's office confirmed his death to USA TODAY.

She said documentation found with Heard's body listed his age as 71 (although the March 7,1945 birthdate cited on IMDB.com puts him at 72) and residence as Studio City. Calif.

TMZ reported The Hollywood Reporter and Variety reported that Heard's body was discovered in a hotel room near Stanford Medical Center in Palo Alto, where he had recently undergone back surgery. 

In addition to his role as Peter McAllister in the Home Alone franchise, Heard also starred as a co-worker to Tom Hanks in the 1988 comedy Big and a dirty cop in the first season of HBO's The Sopranos, for which he earned a guest-acting Emmy nomination in 1999.

Heard's other credits include films The Milagro Beanfield War and Beaches (both released in 1988) and the John Grisham adaptation The Pelican Brief (1993).  He also starred in the TV adaptation of the author's 1993 novel The Client and had guest roles in the CSI franchise.

Heard was married three times: first to Superman actress Margot Kidder, in the late 1970s, then to Sharon Heard from 1988 to 1996, with whom he had two children (son Max and daughter Annika) and finally, Lana Pritchard for less than a year in 2010. 

He also had another son, Jack, the subject of a bitter custody dispute with former partner and future Oscar-winning actress Melissa Leo. She and her boyfriend at the time accused him of assault and stalking in 1996 at their home in Baltimore, where she was working on the 1990s detective series Homicide: Life on the Street.

Co-stars from across the years mourned him on Twitter including, Elizabeth Perkins, who ditched Heard's hard-charging toy executive character for Tom Hanks in Big.