Gary Frederick Filsinger Obituary

Death: November 25, 2025

Gary F. Filsinger was born in Buffalo, New York, on March 29, 1936. He graduated from Amherst Central High School in Snyder, New York, and the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. There, he studied Chinese language and English literature, and was part of the English honors program. He later attended the University of Buffalo in their teaching program but left to pursue a career in acting in New York City.

Mr. Filsinger was involved in many off-off Broadway productions as both an actor and director. At the former Cafe Cino, he was involved in the original production of “Dames at Sea” with Bernadette Peters. He was also involved in children’s theater with Kay Rockefeller. Filsinger worked as an actor and served as an artistic director at the Theater at Monmouth in Maine in the late 1960s, and as artistic director of the Undercroft Players (an Actors Equity showcase theater) for 12 years in the early 2000s at Trinity Lutheran Church in New York. He later sang in opera productions at Trinity with composer and director David Clenny.

Mr. Filsinger was also employed in the communications departments at the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America, the Reformed Church in America, and the Episcopal Church. He was a member of Actors Equity and Trinity Lutheran Church.

His great uncle William Zacharias was a member of the Buffalo Philharmonic in the 1950s, and his grandfather Martin B. Heisler ran for Congress for the Erie County area in 1930.

Mr. Filsinger is survived by his loving cousins Carol Heisler Lett and family of Williamsville, New York, and Grand Island, and other Heisler cousins in Buffalo and Rochester, and Texas, by Sandra Filsinger Hassinger and family of Florida and Buffalo, and by the family of his deceased cousin Dr. Gordon Kauderer of Williamsville; by his longtime partner and former spouse, David Clenny, of New York City; and by his sister, Cheryl Filsinger Held, and brother-in-law George Held, of Bronxville, New York, and Sag Harbor, New York. His parents, Frederick Harold Filsinger and Erna Heisler Filsinger, predeceased him. Mr. Filsinger’s earliest ancestors in America were Mennonites in Pennsylvania in the early 1700s.