Christopher Plummer has died at age 91. I loved him in his Oscar-winning performance in Beginners and in 2019’s Knives Out. One of the great Shakespearean stage actors of his generation, Plummer’s TV and movie career, with its 372 screen credits, eclipses the adjective “prolific”. Plummer, of course is best known for that beloved movie that I despise (as did he for decades), The Sound of Music. Plummer elevated some fine movies in his supporting roles: The Man Who Would Be King, Jesus of Nazareth. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Here’s his NYT obit.
Dean Stockwell’s 70-year acting career contained at least four distinct chapters, between which he took mostly voluntary breaks. He started as a child star – one of the biggest; he was spanked by William Powell in Son of the Thin Man and acted with Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra in Anchors Aweigh. After walking away as a teenager, he returned for serious, original roles in Compulsion and Long Day’s Journey Into Night. During his hippie drop-out phase, he dropped back in for the Roger Corman hippie exploitation movie Psych-out. Then Stockwell played Harry Dean Stanton’s sympathetic brother in Wim Wenders masterpiece Paris, Texas. He followed that with hos most indelible performance, as his friend Dennis Hopper’s terrifying henchman in Blue Velvet, where he unforgettably lip-synchs a Roy Orbison tune. Stockwell topped of his career with the popular television series Quantum Leap. Here is Sheila O’Malley’s marvelous tribute at RogerEbert.com.
Hal Holbrook, known for his one-man stage personification of Mark Twain between 1947 and 2005, has died at age 95. Holbrook was responsible for the most gripping moments in a great movie, All the President’s Men, even though he was always in the dark or on the phone, and his face was never seen.
Actor Yaphet Kotto made plenty of big movies (Alien) and is most remembered for starring 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.
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.
Cicely Tyson was nominated for a Best Actress Oscar for Sounder. I recently wrote of her radiant big screen debut in A Man Called Adam. Two great speeches, in which she absolutely commands the screen, showcase her talent; you can tell that this is going to be a movie star.
Actor, director and producer Norman Lloyd 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.
I first became aware of Cloris Leachman, who died this year at age 94, in 1971 – in her Oscar-winning performance in The Last Picture Show. Then I enjoyed her as Frau Blücher in Young Frankenstein and as Phyllis Lindstrom in The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Much later, as I delved into film noir, I learned that her movie debut was in the startling opening scene of the 1955 atomic noir Kiss Me Deadly.
What I didn’t know was that Leachman had, beginning in 1947, already amassed over 100 of her 285 screen credits before The Last Picture Show. Before her great run in the 70s, she had a prolific career in television, including guest appearances on Perry Mason, Mannix, The Big Valley, Dr. Kildare, Gunsmoke and 77 Sunset Strip. She even appeared 28 times in a recurring role on Lassie.
But Leachman will be forever remembered for her performance at age 45 as Ruth Popper in The Last Picture Show. Ruth Popper is the neglected wife of the football coach in a windswept Texas hamlet, a woman trapped in the most profound loneliness. She seeks comfort in an affair with Sonny (Timothy Bottoms), the local good kid, who is 18. This relationship cannot last, and Ruth’s final monologue with Sonny is devastating.
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
Olympia Dukakis was a stage actress of renown She was 56 when she got a screen role in her sweet spot (Moonstruck) and knocked it for an Oscar. She was perfect as the only-in-San-Francisco Anna Madrigal in the miniseries Tales of the City in 1993, 1998 and 2019. For a completely unrestrained Olympia Dukakis performance, try the little 2011 Canadian dramedy Cloudburst (Amazon – included with Prime, AppleTV).
Charles Grodin‘s perfect role was as an accountant in way over his head; a bounty hunter (Robert De Niro) is taking him across the country as they are being pursed by the FBI (Yaphet Kottto) and the Mafia (Dennis Farina). Grodin’s was an exquisite performance in a very funny movie.
Grodin was known for characters consumed by handwringing anxiety, with the exception of his more likeable role in the Jill Clayburgh vehicle It’s My Turn. He broke through in 1972’s The Heartbreak Kid, playing a guy on his honeymoon who falls for a beautiful woman (Cybill Shepherd) with whom he is not honeymooning. (He was also well-known for his appearances on television talk shows, including his own.)
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.
