In the past week, we’ve lost three fine screen actors, Yaphet Kotto, George Segal and, today, Jessica Walter.
REMEMBRANCE
Actor Yaphet Kotto has died at 81. Kotto made plenty of big movies (Alien) and is most remembered for starring in the television series Homicide: Life on the Street, as the Bond villain in Live and Let Die and as Idi Amin in the superb TV movie Raid on Entebbe. I most appreciate his performance in Paul Schrader’s 1978 Blue Collar, with Richard Pryor and Harvey Keitel, set in an auto factory. The Movie Gourmet comes from an autoworker family, and I have worked in a plant like the one in the movie, so I found the film especially evocative. Kotto was also excellent as the FBI agent shepherding Charles Grodin in Midnight Run.
George Segal’s big screen breakthrough came in that most searing exploration of toxic marriages, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? My favorite George Segal performance came in what is arguably Robert Altman’s best movie, California Split. Segal and Elliot Gould played two compulsive gamblers; as usual, Gould had the flamboyant part, but Segal was masterful as his more contained character slipped bit by bit into the vortex of addictive behavior.
Jessica Walter was an incredibly prolific television actress with one great movie performance. That performance was as Evelyn, Clint Eastwood’s nightmare of a one night stand in Play Misty for Me. Walter topped off her career as Lucille Bluth in 84 episodes of Arrested Development. I don’t know what the record is for guest spots in 1972-76 detective shows, but Water appeared in Banyon, Cannon, The F.B.I. (six times), Mannix, Columbo, Ironside, Barnaby Jones, Hawaii Five-O, Banacek, McCloud, The Streets of San Francisco, and MacMillan & Wife.