Best Character Actors

Yep.

 

Sirs, Madames,

Great as Dobson, comedy-club killer in Law and Order. (He got away but was so good that they brought his character back for a second murder and finally convicted him. His best line was when he looked at Benjamin Bratt and asked Lennie, "What happened to the other guy? ... Chris Noth had left the show that season.) Miller slayed as a doorman in Seinfeld.

Old days:

Warren Oates (Two-Lane Blacktop, In the Heat of the Night, the sargeant in Stripes)

Harry Dean Stanton (footnote: small piece in Two-Lane Blacktop beside Warren Oates, guitar-playing inmate in Cool Hand Luke, a production that seemed to hire every character actor in Hollywood)

George Kennedy (who won an Oscar for all character actors in CHL)

Murray Hamilton (Mr Robinson in The Graduate, a high-roller at the Kentucky Derby in The Hustler and Mr Death in The Twilight Zone)

Simon Oakland (Kolchak's boss, Verne St Cloud in Rockford)

Allan Melvin (who was Sam the Butcher in The Brady Bunch, Barney Hafner on All in the Family, Henshaw on Sgt Bilko and Sol Pomerantz on Dick Van Dyke, among dozens of others)

YD&OHS, etc

 

My favorite Larry Miller moment is when he was the doorman in a Seinfeld episode. Jerry goes up to get Elaine in Mr. Pitt's apartment and Larry starts a convo with Jerry.

My favorite line, in Milleresque deliverance: "What are you, the boyfriend? Here for a quickie?"

The delivery was perfect.

 

Ned Beatty
GD Spradlin
David Wells
Ronnie Shell
Slim Pickens
James Cromwell
Howard McNear

 

ditto the J.T. Walsh nomination. he was beyond is good most roles, Sling Blade coming immediately to mind

 

a forehead-slapper right there. of course!

 

Sirs, Madames,

Re Larry Miller

After two decades in Hollywood writing, producing and appearing in some 50 films (Get Smart, Waiting for Guffman, The Nutty Professor and, most famously, Pretty Woman, as the fawning sales clerk) and in TV's Seinfeld (as the smiling but malevolent apartment doorman), he's been back on the road again for several months, reconnecting with his comedic roots ... Miller came to comedy almost accidentally. The Long Island, N.Y., native He'd studied music in college (he plays the drums, among other instruments), considered law school and, not really sure about his future after graduation, took a job with Amtrak as a reservations agent in New York. One night in 1977, he went to a comedy club that had just opened. The first comedian he saw was a young Jerry Seinfeld. “And I thought, ‘This is good. I like this.' ” He started performing soon after.

Probably his scariest moment in standup came the night he wrote and delivered his first original joke, to a high-school prom audience in rural New Jersey. The joke played with the notion that, however important we become in life, our teachers were, are and will forever be addressed with formality, as Miss This or Mr. That. So in the joke that opened his act, Miller had a student who became Secretary of State say, “Hey, Mr. Cooper, remember when we set you on fire?”

“Now, not only was there no laughter,” recalls Miller, “but there was this palpable wave of hate, visible, like heat coming off a radiator in the winter. I shook it off and limped through another 19 minutes of something. And what happened was that, apparently the week before, a beloved, Mr. Chips-like teacher at the same school, named Mr. Cooper, had died in a terrible fire.

“How could I know that? The odds are incalculable. So we had to beat it to the parking lot and our '66 Nova while this throng pursued us, like villagers in a Frankenstein movie with torches.”

Later, after years on the circuit, he was runner-up to Jason Alexander for the George Costanza role on Seinfeld.

“Anything that you don't get is disappointing,” allows Miller.

“A series. A movie part. But it's still of a piece with me. I just love that I'm here now and alive. Would I have been a better comic, writer, actor, husband, father [he and his wife, writer Eileen Conn, have two young sons]? The answer is no. Will I continue to put bricks in the wall or 10 rows of bricks in the wall? Well, I guess we'll find out. Because you can either dive out the window and lose every game you've been asked to play, or say, ‘You know what? I will go on.' And enjoy the moments.”

Seinfeld, he says, was a comedic equivalent of a gimme. “The writing was so good that all you had to do – Spencer Tracy said this – was just say the words and don't bump into the furniture. And Jerry said to me the first or second day, because I was trying to add all sorts of stuff, and he said, ‘No, just stand there. It's already funny.' ” The two remain close friends.

YD&OHS, etc

 

Stuart Margolian
Joe Santos

 

No love for Brad Renfro? I heard he was great in The Client.

 

Johnny Depp

 

Oh, shit. I forgot Christopher Walken.

 

Damn. Ya, Walken's in my top five for sure....

Loved him in "Suicide Kings"