Actor Ned Beatty, Oscar-nominated for Network, amassed 165 screen credits, and Beatty was impeccable in every one that I’ve seen. Pudgy people (including The Movie Gourmet) are often underestimated; character actor Ned Beatty was certainly one of his generation’s greatest screen actors.
Beatty has been so prolific and so consistently excellent, that it’s now hard to grok that his most unforgettable performance, in Deliverance, was also his first movie. The rape scene in Deliverance was so shocking and so sensational that many overlook how perfectly Beatty played each of his scenes, including the one with the Banjo Boy and the one where his assailant has been dispatched by Burt Reynold’s arrow.
Actor, director and producer Norman Lloyd has died at age 106. Lloyd was the villain in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1942 nailbiter Saboteur, and his career stretched through 2015 (when he was a centenarian). His most remembered role was as Dr. Daniel Auschlander on television’s St Elsewhere. Among his achievements – a 75 year marriage.
As an actor on stage, radio, television and the Big Screen, Lloyd worked with Hitchcock, Charlie Chaplin, Orson Welles, Jean Renoir, Anthony Mann, Elia Kazan and Martin Scorsese. He acted with stars from Dana Andrews and Burt Lancaster to Denzel Washington. Fortunately for film fans, Lloyd was a delightful, anecdote-rich raconteur.
My own favorite Norman Lloyd performance was as the highly idiosyncratic stoolie Sleeper in Scene of the Crime.
