Lucy's Character Actors and Actresses

Always on the lookout for a new approach to writing about one of my favorite subjects in classic movies—character actors and actresses—I recently came up with one that combines my love of character performers with another of my loves: the television series I Love Lucy. I first started watching the show as a child during summer vacations. Every morning at 9 a.m. I would be plunked in front of the TV set to watch Lucy come up with another outlandish scheme that involved Ethel, Ricky, and Fred. Over the years I've seen all of the Lucy episodes, some many times.



When Lucy went to Hollywood during seasons 4 and 5 of the show, each week she featured a big-name guest star like William Holden or John Wayne who played straight man to Lucy for the privilege of plugging his or her latest movie to Lucy's huge TV audience. But before this Lucy often used familiar character actors and actresses not as guest stars but in their well-known capacity as character performers. One thing I began to notice as I rewatched I Love Lucy after becoming more familiar with American movies from the 1930s-1960s was how often these former studio character actors appeared in episodes of the show and how much they contributed to it.



There are several reasons for this. The 1950s were the decade in which these people were transitioning from working for the movie studios, then in decline, to working in television. Most of the established studio character performers had second careers in which they became regular fixtures of the Westerns, mysteries, anthology series, and sitcoms that were the staple programming of television in that decade. Lucy was well known as one of the great social networkers of Hollywood. She had been in the movies for twenty years before getting her own TV series, working her way up from bit parts, often uncredited, to supporting roles at RKO and finally landing a contract at the most prestigious studio in Hollywood, MGM—the culmination of years of unflagging ambition and patient hard work. During those years Lucy had worked with many of the character actors who appeared in her show, and it's likely that she personally knew most of them. Lucy and Desi owned Desilu, which produced not only her own show but many of the TV series of the 1950s—everything from sitcoms like December Bride to adventure series like Whirlybirds. Many of the character actors who worked on I Love Lucy also worked in other Desilu series and later appeared in the two Lucille Ball series that followed I Love Lucy.



I've chosen fifteen character actors and actresses whom I recall from episodes of I Love Lucy, many of them episodes from the years before Lucy Ricardo went to Hollywood. A few of these I've written on in a more general way in previous posts (I've provided links to those posts), so I'll deal with them first.



•Edward Everett Horton. He appeared in season 1 in the episode "Lucy Plays Cupid" as Mr. Ritter, the grocer Lucy tries to fix up with her elderly neighbor (a hilarious Bea Benadaret, actually Lucy's first choice for Ethel Mertz, here playing a character much older than she really was). The only problem is that Mr. Ritter mistakenly believes Lucy is hitting on him for herself and wants to leave Ricky and elope with him, forcing Lucy to get up to various shenanigans to disabuse him of this notion. The comfortable rapport between these two consummate professionals was quite apparent in the many scenes they had together. Lucy had previously appeared in three movies with Edward Everett Horton, the first of which was the Astaire-Rogers musical Top Hat (1935), in which Lucy played, uncredited, a clerk in a florist's shop. Click here for more about Edward Everett Horton.



•Elizabeth Patterson. The first episode she appeared in was "The Marriage License" in season 1. In this episode Lucy believes that an error in her marriage license means that she and Ricky aren't legally married, and she and Ricky return to the justice of the peace who married them to get remarried. Elizabeth Patterson plays the wife of the justice of the peace. The two actresses had never appeared together before, but Lucy must have liked her work because she later gave her a semi-regular role as the Ricardos' neighbor Mrs. Trumbull, and she appeared as that character in ten episodes between 1952-1956. Click here for more about Elizabeth Patterson.



•Elsa Lanchester. In season 6 of the series, Elsa Lanchester plays the bossy woman who drives Lucy and Ethel to Florida after Lucy loses their train tickets in the episode "Off to Florida." After finding an axe in the trunk of the car, the pair become convinced that Lanchester is the notorious axe murderess who has just escaped from prison. Lanchester had never worked with Lucy before but did later appear in an episode of Here's Lucy. Click here for more about Elsa Lanchester.



•Strother Martin. In the same episode Elsa Lanchester appeared in, Strother Martin plays the waiter/cook at a greasy spoon where the women stop on their way to Florida. When Martin appeared in that 1956 episode, he had played small parts in movies like Kiss Me Deadly (1955) but would become really established as a recognizable character actor later, especially in Westerns like The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) and The Wild Bunch (1969). Perhaps his best-known film role is as the Captain of the chain gang in Cool Hand Luke (1967).



•Charles Lane. Often considered the quintessential character actor who most classic movie fans instantly recognize but not many can actually name, Lane (1905-2007) appeared in an incredible 350 movies and television shows, including four episodes of I Love Lucy. My favorite is the one from season 5 called "Staten Island Ferry," in which Lucy and Fred fall asleep on the Staten Island Ferry after taking too many seasick pills in preparation for their ocean voyage to Europe and barely make it to the passport office in time to get their passports. Lane plays the officious passport clerk who refuses to keep the office open late for them. He had appeared with Lucy in seven movies in the 1930s and 1940s and later would appear in six episodes of subsequent Lucy series.



•Jack Albertson. The only Oscar winner among this group (best supporting actor for 1968's The Subject Was Roses). Albertson has more than 160 movies (look for him as the mail sorter at the very beginning of Miracle on 34th Street) and TV series in his résumé, everything from The Twilight Zone and Dr. Kildare to Bonanza, but dozens of sitcoms, many produced by Desilu. He was a regular in 88 episodes of the Freddie Prinze series Chico and the Man (1974-1978). In season 5 of I Love Lucy in the episode "Bon Voyage" he plays the helicopter dispatcher who saves the day when Lucy misses the boat to Europe and has to be airlifted to it. I've always wondered if this episode used stock footage of helicopters from the Desilu series Whirlybirds.



•Charles Winninger. This veteran character actor played Fred's former vaudeville partner Barney Kurtz in the episode "Mertz and Kurtz" in season 4. Highlights of the episode include Lucy pretending to be the Mertz's maid to impress Barney and as a finale an elaborate old-time vaudeville show with Winninger and the entire cast performing at Ricky's night club. Lucy had worked with Winninger in one movie in the 1940s. His most famous role was as Cap'n Andy ("HAPPY New Year!") in the original Broadway production and 1936 movie version of Show Boat. He also had memorable parts in Destry Rides Again (1939) and as the tipsy Dr. Downer who misdiagnoses Hazel Flagg (Carole Lombard) in Nothing Sacred (1937).



•Allen Jenkins. With his aquiline features, nasal voice, and Brooklyn accent, he appeared in nearly 150 movies and TV shows, sometimes as a menacing hoodlum, more often as a slightly dim comic cop or gangster. He played both of these many times as a Warner Bros. contract player in the 1930s but worked in all genres, even Westerns and musicals. One of his most memorable roles was as a sinister thug named Hunk, gangster Humphrey Bogart's crony in Dead End (1937). In the early 1940s he played George Sanders's comic sidekick "Goldy" Locke in the Falcon series. He and Lucy were both in the RKO picture Five Came Back (1939). He appeared in three episodes of Lucy in seasons 1-3, each time playing a policeman with whom Lucy has a run-in.



•Ellen Corby. Later famous as Grandma Walton on the TV series The Waltons in the 1970s (she won three Emmys and one Golden Globe for the series), Ellen Corby played in more than 200 films—everything from Laurel and Hardy movies to classics like It's a Wonderful Life, Shane, and Vertigo, often uncredited—and TV shows. She received an Oscar nomination as best supporting actress for I Remember Mama (1948) and won the Golden Globe for that performance. She had worked with Lucy in two films in the 1940s. In season 6 she played Lucy's former high school drama coach in an episode called "Lucy Meets Orson Welles" in which Lucy unwittingly becomes Welles's assistant in a magic show. She later appeared in two 1962 episodes of The Lucy Show.



•Will Wright. A familiar face with over 200 acting credits, Will Wright had appeared with Lucy and William Holden in Miss Grant Takes Richmond (1949). Probably his best-known role was as the house detective in the Alan Ladd-Veronica Lake film noir The Blue Dahlia (1946). He was in two episodes of Lucy. The one I especially remember is "Tennessee Bound" from season 4. On their way to California, the Ricardos and Mertzes make a detour to visit their old friend Tennessee Ernie Ford and are caught in a speed trap in a small town and thrown in jail. It turns out that what the sheriff (Wright) really wants is an audition with Ricky for his chubby, petite twin daughters Teensy and Weensy, who end up performing "Ricochet Romance" for Ricky before Tennessee Ernie shows up to rescue them. After Lucy et al. finally reach California, she slips in a plug for the actor's Beverly Hills ice cream parlor—located across the street from Lucy's onetime home studio, RKO, which Desilu bought in 1957—when in one episode bored Lucy says to Ethel something like, "Let's go to Will Wright's ice cream parlor and try the other 30 flavors."



•Eduardo Ciannelli. Born in southern Italy, he trained as a doctor before turning to acting. With more than 150 acting roles to his credit, he specialized in ethnic, especially Italian, roles, often of unsavory characters. He and Lucy (unbilled) appeared together in Winterset (1936). Two of his most memorable roles were as the sadistic mob boss in the Bette Davis movie Marked Woman (1937), a character supposedly based on the gangster Lucky Luciano, and as the fanatical leader of the Thuggees in Gunga Din (1939). In the 1950s he divided his work between Italy and the US. He appeared in season 6 of Lucy in the episode "Visitor from Italy" playing Mr. Martinelli, the owner of the pizza parlor where Lucy substitutes as a pizza chef and performs one of her most memorable bits of slapstick trying to perfect the art of tossing pizza crust in the air.



•Hans Conried. His eccentric manner and speech made him instantly identifiable. Probably best remembered as the mad piano teacher in The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T. (1953), he was credited with more than 200 roles dating from 1938, including The Big Street (1942) with Lucy and Henry Fonda. He had a continuing role as Uncle Tonoose in Danny Thomas's Desilu-produced sitcom Make Room for Daddy. He actually appeared in two episodes of Lucy, but the one I vividly recall is the one from season 2 called "Lucy Hires an English Tutor." Filmed while Lucy was pregnant, the premise is that Lucy wants her baby to speak English perfectly, so she hires a pernickety speech tutor (Conried) to coach her. The rub is that the fussy academic actually wants to be in show business and only took the job as a way to get an audition with Ricky.



•Mary Wickes. The gawky, buck-toothed actress worked in movies and TV for sixty years, from 1935 to 1995, and is probably best remembered for one of her earliest parts, as the nurse tormented by Sheridan Whiteside in The Man Who Came to Dinner (1941). She was in the season 1 episode "The Ballet" as the demanding French ballet instructor Madame Lamand, whose class Lucy attends when she wants to get a part as a ballerina in Ricky's show. The episode gave Lucy another opportunity to indulge her penchant for physical comedy. Wickes had never worked with Lucy before this, but the two must have gotten along well because she later appeared in seven episodes of The Lucy Show and nine episodes of Here's Lucy.



•Olin Howland. He was in more than 200 movies and TV shows between 1918 and 1959, the majority of his movie roles so small they were uncredited, often playing hicks or bumpkins. I saw him not long ago in Nothing Sacred (1937) as the laconic railroad station agent, the first person Fredric March meets in the small New England town where he has gone to interview Hazel Flagg. In season 4 of Lucy he plays George Skinner, the owner of the isolated motel/cafe in Ohio where the Ricardos and Mertzes are forced to spend their first night on the way to California in the episode "First Stop." The way he switches hats as he switches roles from desk clerk to cook and back again is hilarious. Of course, their room turns out to be miserably uncomfortable, with lumpy mattresses and trains thundering past just feet from the window every couple of minutes. Yet Skinner behaves as though his establishment is the Hilton as he shamelessly overcharges his hapless guests for everything.



•Madge Blake. The petite actress with the mellifluous voice was 50 years old when she appeared in her first movie, playing Spencer Tracy's mother in Adam's Rib (1949). Probably her most famous role was as the chatty gossip columnist Dora Bailey, who emcees the movie premiere Gene Kelly and Jean Hagen attend in Singin' in the Rain (1952). On TV she played Aunt Harriet in 88 episodes of Batman and had continuing roles in The Jack Benny Program, Leave It to Beaver, and The Real McCoys. She appeared in two Lucy episodes, the one I recall more vividly being the season 3 episode "Ricky Loses His Temper." That's just what he does when Lucy develops an obsession with buying hats. The result is one of those bets that so often formed the premise of an episode: Ricky bets Lucy he can avoid losing his temper longer than she can resist buying another hat. Lucy, however, doesn't take into account the persuasive sales technique of kindly hat store owner Madge Blake, who maneuvers her into buying a new hat on the sly, confident that Ricky will lose his temper before he finds out about her illicit purchase.

More of Hollywood's Greatest Character Actors and Actresses

Of all the posts that have appeared at The Movie Projector, the hands-down favorite in terms of the number of times viewed is the one titled "Hollywood's Greatest Character Actors and Actresses" from October 2008. In that post I listed my top ten character actors and top ten character actresses from the Golden Age of Hollywood, the studio era, roughly from the early 1930s through the early 1960s. The post appeared on IMDb's "Hit List" and elicited a record 65 comments (the usual mix of the thoughtful and pertinent, the cranky and irrelevant). Even today it is still visited by people, many from outside the US, using search engines to find information about those great character actors and actresses of the American studio era. This is clearly a subject of enduring interest.

So I have decided to post a follow-up with 25 more of the great character actors and actresses of that time. For some reason, this area seems to be dominated by men, perhaps because the movies have always placed such an emphasis on idealized female beauty and youth, so this time I'm listing fifteen male actors and ten female: no gender discrimination is intended. As before, I have used an asterisk to indicate a signature performance for each.

I should clarify some of the criteria I considered when compiling this list, which are the same ones I used for my original post on the subject. Of course, I could only include actors with whose careers I am familiar. There are many character actors of whom I am aware, but unless I have seen them in enough pictures to have a knowledgeable overview of their careers, I could not consider them for inclusion. I considered only actors whose careers lasted a number of years and who appeared in several noteworthy roles. Like many of the character actors of the studio era, some of these people had careers that lasted for decades in movies and then continued for a number of years more on television.

The term "character actor" as I use it is a pretty broad one. Generally, the people I refer to as character actors specialized in one type of character for practically their entire career. Even though I tended to choose for the signature performance one that seemed the exemplar of that character type, I sometimes chose instead a role that went against type for the simple reason that this was the performance that really stood out for me. Not everyone on the list, however, specialized in a type. Some, such as Walter Huston and Raymond Massey, paradoxically seemed worthy of inclusion precisely because they showed amazing versatility and successfully played such a range of character types.

Some of those on the list played the occasional lead, but I concentrated on performers who for the bulk of their careers worked in supporting roles. In the studio era it was not uncommon for actors to begin as leading players and in middle age shift to supporting parts. A good example of this is Herbert Marshall, whom I included.

Conversely, Clifton Webb began playing supporting parts—his debut role as Waldo Lydecker in Laura (1944) is exactly the kind I had in mind when I began this post—but soon graduated to leads and played these for most of his career, so that even though his early roles made him seem a candidate for inclusion, and even though his later lead roles were also in a sense character parts, his unusual career trajectory in the end made me feel he wasn't really right for this list. The same was true of Lee Marvin, also seriously considered for inclusion. For the first ten years or so of his career—culminating with his performance as one of the meanest villains ever to appear on the screen in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962)—he was exactly the kind of actor appropriate for this list. Then he won his Oscar for Cat Ballou (1965) and spent the next 20 years as a major star playing leads. Claire Trevor, on the other hand, is a good example of a performer who from time to time played the lead—in Murder, My Sweet or Born to Kill, for example—but whose real forte was playing supporting parts of a certain type.

This list, even taken in conjunction with its predecessor, is by no means intended to be inclusive. It would be possible to compile a list of character actors that numbered in the hundreds, so important were these people to the Hollywood studios that churned out literally hundreds of movies a year in their heyday. In fact, one person who responded to the original post has done exactly that at his site King Spud's Movie & TV Pages. Finally, this is a strictly personal list. I'm sure that every reader of this post will have favorites that I haven't included in either of my two lists. Here they are, then, in alphabetical order:

FIFTEEN MORE CLASSIC CHARACTER ACTORS

• Edward Arnold. With his bulky build and deep, authoritative voice, he could bluster and be pompous like no one else. Frank Capra used that bluster for both comic effect (You Can't Take It with You) and menace (Meet John Doe). *Easy Living (1937), as the comically frustrated millionaire who in a rage throws his spendthrift wife's fur coat out the window of their penthouse.
  
• Charles Bickford. A serious actor who was usually an honorable man of strong character, typically the colleague, boss, or friend of the leading player. *Johnny Belinda (1948), as deaf-mute Jane Wyman's stern but ultimately understanding and supportive farmer-father.
  
• Eric Blore. The prim but easily flustered butler/valet with the British accent and the bemused look in his eyes in so many movies, whose skill at the double-take was the equal of Cary Grant's. He appeared in five of the Astaire-Rogers musicals. *Top Hat (1935), as—what else?—a rather impudent valet.
  
• Jack Carson. A 6' 2" bull of a man, he was an expert at playing the flippant but harmless and often slightly dim second lead, the tough-looking guy with a soft center. He did venture occasionally into dramatic parts, even appearing as Paul Newman's ineffectual older brother in the movie version of Tennessee Williams' Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. *A Star Is Born (1954), one of his serious roles, as the unforgiving studio publicist who is Norman Maine's nemesis.
  
• Henry Daniell. With his grim features and unsmiling expression, he seemed born to play the cold villain, which he did in movies and later on television for nearly 35 years. He was the villain in three of the Basil Rathbone-Nigel Bruce Sherlock Holmes movies, including a memorable Professor Moriarty in The Woman in Green (1945). *Camille (1937), as the Baron de Varville, Greta Garbo's possessive sugar daddy, insanely jealous of her attachment to young Armand.
  
• James Gleason. He was the epitome of the plain-talking, salt-of-the-earth, forever middle-aged working man—a cop, a cab driver, a milkman—a sort of male version of Thelma Ritter, in countless movies and television shows. *Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941), as the resurrected prize fighter's bewildered manager.
  
• Edmund Gwenn. He was sometimes a scoundrel—as Katharine Hepburn's criminal father in Sylvia Scarlett, for example—but more often the kindly older gent. He even got in on the science fiction craze of the early 1950s, playing an entomologist in the giant-ant movie Them! *Miracle on 34th Street (1947), in the role of a lifetime as the earnest Kris Kringle in this Christmas classic, which won him an Oscar as best supporting actor.
  
• Edward Everett Horton. An excitable fast-talker and another expert at the double-take. Nobody could convey flustered befuddlement or suspicion that he was the butt of the joke (which he often was) or deliver a smug wisecrack the way he could. In the 1930s he seemed ubiquitous, appearing in no fewer than 12 movies in 1934, 11 in 1935, and 10 in 1937. *Lost Horizon (1937), as the nervous wreck Alexander P. Lovett, a paleontologist who unexpectedly finds fulfillment in Shangri-La.
  
• Walter Huston. An actor of great range who didn't often do comedy (although his deadpan performance in And Then There Were None was hilarious) but always seemed to be having a great time whenever he was on screen. *The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), as an irascible gold prospector, the performance that got him an Oscar for best supporting actor (really a lead performance—he has about the same amount of screen time as top-billed Humphrey Bogart).
  
• Herbert Marshall. In the early 1930s he played suave leading men, most notably in Lubitsch's classic Trouble in Paradise (1932), or suffered nobly as the husband of strong leading women like Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, or Norma Shearer. For the last 25 years of his career he played the same suave, gentlemanly type in supporting parts in movies or on television. *Foreign Correspondent (1940), in which his noble exterior conceals treachery, when as the head of a pacifist group he is unmasked as a Nazi spy. Even so, he ends up dying nobly!
• Raymond Massey. Educated at Oxford University, he was actually Canadian by birth and later became an American citizen. Before playing Dr. Gillespie on television's Dr. Kildare in the early 1960s, he made movies for 30 years, mostly in the US but also occasionally in England. He tended toward roles of great gravity; even his part in Frank Capra's Arsenic and Old Lace was a serious one. His oratorical speaking voice and diction made him a favorite as lawyers, doctors, military officers, and government officials. And he played Abraham Lincoln numerous times on television and on the stage as well as in the movies, receiving an Oscar nomination for Abe Lincoln in Illinois (1940). *East of Eden (1955), as James Dean's rejecting father, a patriarch of Biblical scale, a subtle performance of impressive authority and restraint.
  
• Adolphe Menjou. Beginning in 1914, he appeared in 150 movies and television episodes, specializing in histrionic egomaniacs (he was the original Walter Burns in the 1931 version of The Front Page and the motormouthed lawyer Billy Flynn in 1942's Roxie Hart, the role Richard Gere played in its musical version, Chicago), scoundrels, and cads. *Paths of Glory (1957), as the Machiavellian World War I general who engineers the sacrificial execution of the two enlisted men in Stanley Kubrick's devastating anti-war movie, a role given extra irony by the fact that Menjou was one of the most vociferous right-wingers in McCarthy-era Hollywood.
  
• Thomas Mitchell. In his 25-year long career he played mostly meek nice guys with an occasional foray into darker roles. The peak year of his career was 1939, when he appeared in no less than five of that notable year's best movies: as Cary Grant's best friend in Howard Hawks's Only Angel Have Wings, Scarlett O'Hara's father in Gone With the Wind, king of the beggars in The Hunchback of Notre Dame, a cynical newsman in Frank Capra's Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and one of the passengers in John Ford's Stagecoach. *Stagecoach (1939), as the kind-hearted alcoholic Doc Boone, the performance that earned him an Oscar as best supporting actor.
  
• Charles Ruggles. He specialized in eccentric characters in nearly 100 movies and more than 60 television episodes. He seemed to have been born funny, one of those actors who could bring a smile to your face the moment you saw him. *Ruggles of Red Gap (1935), as the nouveau riche hick from Washington state, the husband of socially ambitious Mary Boland (with whom he made 14 movies in the 1930s), who wins butler Charles Laughton in a card game in Paris and insists on treating him as a social equal.
  
• Roland Young. Like Eric Blore, Henry Daniell, Edmund Gwenn, and Herbert Marshall, he was British-born and never completely lost his accent. He was adept at playing rascals, usually but not always of the lovable variety, including a memorably unctuous Uriah Heep in George Cukor's David Copperfield (1935). *Topper (1937), as the staid, henpecked banker who is taught by a pair of meddlesome ghosts (Cary Grant and Constance Bennett) to loosen up, defy his bossy wife, and enjoy life.
  

TEN MORE CLASSIC CHARACTER ACTRESSES

• Billie Burke. Most famous for being the wife of showman Florenz Ziegfeld and for playing the good witch Glinda in The Wizard of Oz, for two decades she specialized in dithering, unflappable upper-class matrons trying with comic tenacity to uphold social standards. *Dinner at Eight (1933), as the high society wife of a shipping magnate trying to keep up appearances and maintain her composure as she organizes a dinner party for British royalty that is beset with comical disasters.
  
• Jean Hagen. In the late 1940s and early 1950s she played a series of not-too-bright floozies before moving to television, where she was the wife of Danny Thomas in his first TV series and appeared in many other TV episodes, including an especially memorable episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents called "Enough Rope for Two." *Singin' in the Rain (1952), the role of her career as Lina Lamont, the squeaky-voiced silent movie siren trying to make the transition to sound films with hilarious results.
  
• Jesse Royce Landis. Crossing her arms, pursing her lips, rolling her eyes, and delivering arch wisecracks, she played a memorable series of unmaternal mothers to stars like Susan Hayward, Grace Kelly, Anthony Perkins, and even Cary Grant (who was barely seven years younger). *To Catch a Thief (1955), as chic Grace Kelly's down-to-earth mother, who schemes to get her flirtatious daughter married to ex-cat burglar Cary Grant while helping him clear himself of false criminal charges.
  
• Aline MacMahon. Another expert at the arch wisecrack in her 1930s comic roles. As she aged, she continued working in carefully selected, more serious parts until 1975 and was especially good as the relief worker helping displaced children in post-World War II Europe in Fred Zinneman's The Search (1948). *Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933), as Trixie, the comic one of the three showgirls of the title, who boldly uses her slyness, intelligence, and sexiness to snare a middle-aged Boston millionaire.
  
• Mercedes McCambridge. Like Joseph Cotten and Agnes Moorehead, she was a member of Orson Welles' Mercury Theater group. Her distinctively low, raspy voice (she suffered from chronic bronchitis most of her life) made her a popular radio performer in the 1940s and got her the part of the voice of the demon in The Exorcist (which she had to sue to get credit for). She often played assertive career women or abrasive spinsters in movies and on television, but no matter what the role, she always projected forcefulness and seriousness. *Johnny Guitar (1954), unforgettable as Joan Crawford's butch nemesis, a vengeful Fury leading a vigilante mob out to get retribution for the killing of her brother.
  
• Hattie McDaniel. In studio-era Hollywood, African Americans were pretty much limited to playing servants, but at least Hattie McDaniel managed to do so with dignity, a genuinely warm personality, and as much independence as she could squeeze from the role. She's best remembered as Mammy in Gone With the Wind, but my favorite performance of hers is in another Selznick blockbuster. *Since You Went Away (1944), as Claudette Colbert's housekeeper. When she presents a birthday cake to Joseph Cotten, he asks how she managed to make it with rationing restrictions. "I tried something new this year," she answers with a twinkle in her eyes. "I bought it."
  
• Elizabeth Patterson. When I was growing up, I knew her as Mrs. Trumbull, Lucy's neighbor and occasional babysitter on I Love Lucy. Little did I suspect that the petite actress already had more than 100 movie roles to her credit dating back to 1926, when she was already 51 years old. She was the quintessential genteel but plucky elderly woman. *Intruder in the Dust (1949), in which she single-handedly holds off a Mississippi lynch mob trying to get to an African American man falsely accused of murder by sitting all night in the doorway of the local jail with a shotgun on her lap.
  
• May Robson. Born in Australia, she played mothers, aunts, grandmothers, and housekeepers in nearly 50 movies in her heyday decade, the 1930s, when she was in her seventies. *Lady for a Day (1933), Frank Capra's first great success, based on a story by Damon Runyon, as Apple Annie, the penniless apple seller who connives with gangster Dave the Dude and his cronies to stage a charade to convince her naive daughter that she is the society matron she has pretended to be in her letters.
  
• Claire Trevor. Born in Brooklyn, she used her accent to great effect playing the prostitutes, gun molls, and other hard-boiled dames with a heart of gold that made her famous. That she was so well-known for playing disreputable types added credibility to her roles as the more posh femme fatale she played in film noirs of the 1940s before returning to type and winning a supporting actress Oscar as the alcoholic mistress of a gangster in Key Largo (1948). *Stagecoach (1939), as the sensitive and pathetic prostitute Dallas, ashamed at being shunned by the rest of the passengers except for the alcoholic Doc Boone and the naive young Ringo Kid (John Wayne), who offers her redemption and hope in the form of non-judgmental love.
• Shelley Winters. She won two supporting actress Oscars for playing vulgar, shrewish frumps but was equally effective when playing against type. In The Night of the Hunter (1955), Charles Laughton cast her as the credulous widow targeted by psycho Robert Mitchum, and she was unexpectedly sympathetic playing the victim for once rather than a self-centered harpy. *Lolita (1962). Stanley Kubrick recognized in her vulgarity an unplumbed talent for broad comedy, and she was just plain hilarious as Lolita's mother, the pretentious social climber Charlotte Haze.

Hollywood's Greatest Character Actors and Actresses

They played the best friends or parents of the handsome hero or glamorous heroine, their loyal sidekicks, the bystanders making wry comments and wisecracking from the sidelines. In romantic films and musicals they might play the humorous second leads, the kind of roles that Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers played in their first movies together. In more serious movies they were the slimy villains menacing the hero or heroine. They could be eccentric, flamboyant, or even insane. No matter what role they played, no matter what the movie, their character didn't vary a great deal from film to film. From their first appearance on screen, you knew exactly what to expect. These were the character actors and actresses of the American studio movies of the 1930s, 40s, and 50s.

The roles they played correspond to what E. M. Forster in Aspects of the Novel calls "flat characters" in literature: "Flat characters [are] called 'humorous' . . . and are sometimes called types, and sometimes caricatures. In their purest form, they are constructed around a single idea or quality." Forster goes on to describe how "they are easily recognized when they come in . . . and easily remembered." Shakespeare's comedies and even some of the tragedies are rich in such characters—Falstaff, the nurse in Romeo and Juliet, the pompous Polonius in Hamlet, Sir Toby Belch in Twelfth Night—as are the works of Dickens. Mr. Micawber (David Copperfield), Miss Havisham (Great Expectations), Smallweed (Bleak House), Sairey Gamp (Martin Chuzzlewit)—the novels of Dickens are largely populated by flat characters. Similarly, the character actors of the classic American cinema also represent types with a single easily identifiable personality trait, and they too are easily recognized and easily remembered.

The great character actors were more often than not middle-aged or older. Occasionally starring actors would become character actors as they aged, but most often the great character actors started out as such and remained that way for their entire career. Their task was to lend support and, with their unambiguous and more colorful and oversized personalities—the kind of character that is most effective in small doses—supply contrast to the often younger and more attractive stars of the picture.

In recognition of their importance to the industry and their popularity with moviegoers, in 1936 the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences created two new award categories, Best Supporting Actor and Best Supporting Actress. For the most part the people nominated in these categories were character actors performing in character roles. The list of nominees and winners from 1936 to 1960, roughly the end of the studio system, reads like a Who's Who of Hollywood's greatest character actors.

These performers were largely a product of the Hollywood studio system. Under contract to one studio, they often made several pictures a year. Typecasting was the rule for these performers. Once the studio's casting directors found a successful niche for the character actor, one that resonated with audiences, the character actor generally found himself or herself playing the same kind of role in the same movie genre in film after film. Why tamper with a successful formula? was the tenet that drove the career of the perennial studio character actor. Powerful directors like Frank Capra, Howard Hawks, John Ford, and Preston Sturges assembled what amounted to their own repertory company of character actors and used them in one movie after another.

Because they were so closely linked with the Hollywood studio system, the end of the era of the career character actor coincided with the decline of the studios in the early 1960's. Too, the increase in sex and violence in the American movies of the 1960's, the blurring of the once clearly delineated boundaries between the traditional movie genres, and the desire of American filmmakers to emulate the more adult and overtly artistic films of Europe made the type of movie that required character actors seem old-fashioned and outdated. Their kind of movie no longer appealed to younger and hipper audiences.

This was especially true of the movie comedy, the genre that gave these performers the bulk of their work. Billy Wilder's Some Like It Hot (1959) and One, Two, Three (1961) and the Doris Day movies of the early 1960's were some of the last American movies that were out-and-out comedies untinged with melancholia or serious undertones, the kind of movie that the great character actors were best suited to. The old style of movie comedy seemed effete and anachronistic compared to the darker comic sensibility of films like Dr. Strangelove (1964), The Graduate (1967), or MASH (1970), with their trenchant social and political satire, frank approach to sex, and flippant black humor.

In the 1950's the great character actors who once populated the studio genre movies began to turn to television, where their type of role and acting style were still the norm. By the end of the 1960's the migration to television was nearly universal for those still working.

Taking their place in feature films was a new generation of supporting performers. These actors were comfortable in both supporting and lead roles and did not approach the two types of role differently. They applied the same serious and professional approach to both lead and supporting parts, made determined efforts to avoid typecasting, and attempted to give contours and depth to every role whether large or small.

What follows is a set of personal lists of my own favorite character actors and actresses, both classic and contemporary, along with a favorite role for each, indicated by a *.

CLASSIC CHARACTER ACTORS

1. Walter Brennan. The quintessential character actor, he appeared in more than 200 feature films (many of his earliest performances uncredited) and worked with some of the major directors, including Howard Hawks (in six films), John Ford, Frank Capra, William Wyler, Fritz Lang, and Jean Renoir. He even appeared in an Astaire-Rogers movie (The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle, 1939). *The Westerner (1940), as the notorious Judge Roy Bean, successfully combining his usual cheerful folksiness with psychotic megalomania.
   
2. Charles Coburn. He made a career of being irascible but lovable. Although he played many dramatic roles, it was in his comedy roles that he really shone. *The More the Merrier (1943), as the mischievous matchmaker Benjamin Dingle.
3. George Sanders. He was typically unctuous and disreputable, the embodiment of the scurrilous scoundrel . *The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945), in which he played a character clearly modeled on Oscar Wilde himself and spouted witticisms taken directly from The Importance of Being Earnest.
4. Claude Rains. The most versatile of the lot and possibly the most gifted. *Notorious (1946), in which he was quietly menacing but ultimately pathetic.
5. Frank Morgan. An MGM contract player, he got the part of The Wizard of Oz after W. C. Fields turned it down. *The Shop Around the Corner (1940), as the comically overwrought and suicidal owner of the store where James Stewart and Margaret Sullavan worked.
6. Robert Ryan. He was one of the character actors who specialized in sinister roles, and his evil was most convincing. *The Naked Spur (1953), as James Stewart's nemesis.
7. Arthur Kennedy. He could play victims or villains and was equally effective in both modes. *Champion (1949), as the devoted kid brother betrayed by the ruthlessly ambitious Kirk Douglas.
   
8. William Demarest. An expert at expressing comic frustration and stubbornness, he made humorlessness seem funny. *The Miracle of Morgan's Creek (1944), the most memorable of his eight performances for Preston Sturges.
9. Barry Fitzgerald. The master of Irish blarney, which in Going My Way (1944) reached its fullest expression and earned him an Oscar. *The Naked City (1949), the police procedural/film noir in which he gave one of the least typical performances of his career—and perhaps the most interesting—as the lead detective investigating a murder.
10. Tony Randall. The poor man's Jack Lemmon, he became best known for assuming Lemmon's film role as the fussy Felix in the TV sitcom version of The Odd Couple. In feature films he was most memorable as Rock Hudson's foil in three Hudson-Doris Day movies. *Lover Come Back (1961), in which he played Hudson's boss and his rival for Day.

MODERN CHARACTER ACTORS

1. Dennis Hopper. More often nutty than normal, he could be one scary dude. *Blue Velvet (1986), in which he gave an unforgettable performance as the drug-sniffing, psychotic, mommie-obsessed criminal Frank Booth, a character over-the-top even for a David Lynch movie.
2. Tommy Lee Jones. How can somebody so down-to-earth be such a great character actor? It must have something to do with his intensity and focus and with the feeling that the characters he plays conceal nothing: What you see is what you get. *No Country for Old Men (2007), as the stoical sheriff who just can't understand the sociopathic modern criminal.
   
3. Tom Wilkinson. Another actor of great versatility. But like Tommy Lee Jones he's best at playing it sincere. *The Full Monty (1997), as the former factory manager who reluctantly becomes the head of a troupe of male strippers.
4. Steve Buscemi. He can play a great range of types, but he puts his distinctive stamp on every role. *Ghost World (2000), as the lonely, record-collecting oddball Seymour.
   
5. Morgan Freeman. Adept at playing characters of great sincerity, integrity, and gravitas. *Se7en (1996), as the no-nonsense police detective pursuing a psycho killer with Brad Pitt.

CLASSIC CHARACTER ACTRESSES

1. Thelma Ritter. I once devoted an entire post to Thelma Ritter titled "The Greatest Character Actress. *Pickup on South Street (1953), one of her rare serious parts, as the fatalistic and doomed Moe, a small-time street peddler and police informant.
2. Agnes Moorhead. She was as cold as the snow outside the window in her debut in Citizen Kane (1941) and on fire as the neurotic Aunt Fanny in her follow-up role in Welles's The Magnificent Ambersons (1942). In the next 30 years she successfully played everything in between. *All That Heaven Allows (1955), as Jane Wyman's loyal friend and confidante.
3. Eve Arden. The self-sufficient strength of her characters was masked by wry asides and arch wisecracks. And nobody cracked wise better than Eve Arden. *Mildred Pierce (1945), as the troubled Joan Crawford's steadfast friend.
   
4. Mary Astor. She could play good or bad, selfless or self-centered, erotic or maternal with equal conviction. *The Maltese Falcon (1941), as Brigid O'Shaughnessy, the archetypal femme fatale of film noir.
5. Dame May Whitty. The embodiment of the genteel British dowager. *Night Must Fall (1937), as the rich, crotchety old lady manipulated by smooth-talking Robert Montgomery, a psycho killer who carried his victim's severed head around in a hatbox.
6. Angela Lansbury. She was sassy and flirtatious as the teenaged maid in Gaslight (1944) and touchingly fragile singing "Yellow Bird" in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945). By the late 1940's she was playing middle-aged women while still in her early 20's. *The Manchurian Candidate (1962), as the most unwholesomely possessive mother ever to appear on the screen.
7. Elsa Lanchester. She was equally at ease playing normal or eccentric, but nobody did eccentric like Lanchester. *The Big Clock (1948)—one of a dozen movies in which she appeared with her husband, Charles Laughton—in which she made a big impression with very little screen time as a flighty, temperamental artist.
8. Ethel Barrymore. The archetypal kind-hearted elderly lady. *The Farmer's Daughter (1947), as Joseph Cotten's rather regal mother who befriends and acts as mentor to Loretta Young, the family's Swedish American maid.
   
9. Joan Blondell. She was a big star in the early 1930's but spent the rest of her 50-year long acting career in supporting parts. *Nightmare Alley (1947), a sizzling performance as the charlatan psychic and fortune teller in a circus sideshow.
10. Gloria Grahame. The epitome of the good-bad girl. *The Big Heat (1954), as sadistic gangster Lee Marvin's moll. Who could forget those scenes with the coffee pot?

MODERN CHARACTER ACTRESSES

1. Anjelica Huston. Her career seriously took off with her Oscar-winning turn in Prizzi's Honor (1985), which she followed up with several amazing supporting performances. *The Dead (1987), in which she played Greta Conroy in her father John Huston's last film, an adaptation of the great James Joyce short story from Dubliners. Her last scene in the movie is stunning and absolutely heartbreaking.
2. Dianne Wiest. A favorite of Woody Allen, who brings out her funny side. *Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), in which she impersonates the ultimate flake.
3. Maggie Smith. She won a Best Actress Oscar for 1969's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, but her forte has always been smaller character roles. *A Room with a View (1985), as Helena Bonham Carter's strait-laced Aunt Charlotte, who ultimately reveals herself actually to be a repressed romantic.
4. Frances McDormand. She also won a Best Actress Oscar (for Fargo, 1996) but like Maggie Smith is at heart a character actress at her best in supporting roles. *Almost Famous (2000), as the hilariously overbearing mother of a teenaged aspiring rock journalist.
5. Patricia Clarkson. Her amazing range allows her to be equally effective as kooks, strong women, and vulnerable characters. *The Station Agent (2003), a subtle and very moving performance as an emotionally wounded woman yearning for friendship and connection.

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Click here to read my follow-up post "More of Hollywood's Greatest Character Actors and Actresses."

Thelma Ritter: The Greatest Character Actress

In 1947 a 42-year old unknown actress from Brooklyn who had trained at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts but had appeared in only minor stage and radio parts made her first movie. The role was uncredited and she appeared in a brief scene near the beginning of the movie. In that scene she played the mother of a fractious child who cannot find the Christmas present her boy wants at Macy's and is directed by the department store Santa Claus to a competing store. The scene was devised to highlight the integrity of the possibly delusional elderly man playing Santa Claus (who calls himself Kris Kringle) and to advance the plot by placing his job in jeopardy. The Santa was played by the great character actor Edmund Gwenn in the role of a lifetime that would earn him the Oscar as Best Supporting Actor. But it was the unknown actress who dominated the scene, effortlessly stealing it from its intended focus and creating an unforgettable impression. The movie was, of course, the Christmas classic Miracle on 34th Street and the actress was Thelma Ritter.

The tiny role also did a great deal to set the screen persona that Ritter would, with only minor variations, later turn into a twenty-year-long career. As the mother in Miracle on 34th Street Ritter immediately made a strong impression as an outspoken, determined, confident woman who tolerates no nonsense and is in full control of herself and the situation. What was the origin of these basic qualities that seemed to emerge in nearly every character she played? Was it an intentionally created image, either by her agents or by the actress herself? Was it an example of studio typecasting (most of her early pictures, including Miracle on 34th Street, were 20th Century-Fox productions)? Was it the conscious or unconscious projection of traits she actually possessed? Nobody can say for certain. What one can say is that the "Thelma Ritter character" in a movie is typified by certain elements that don't vary a great deal no matter what the role or the context.

Thelma Ritter is always candid. Completely lacking in pretense, she is the plain-speaking, straight-spoken voice of reason. She is the person who keeps things grounded in reality when willful blindness to reality threatens to send the situation out of control. She is the one who tries to keep things down-to-earth when flights of fancy seem about to overcome normally reasonable and practical people.

As Stella, James Stewart's nurse in Rear Window, it is Ritter who repeatedly warns Stewart of the folly of his pastime of spying on his neighbors. She is the oracle predicting the danger in allowing a seemingly harmless way to while away the hours spent confined to a wheelchair to become an uncontrollable obsession, of allowing wanton curiosity to metamorphose into voyeurism. When outright warnings don't work, she attempts to redirect Stewart's attention by counseling him to marry his girlfriend (Grace Kelly) instead and inject some stability into his peripatetic life as a news photographer. But after Stewart ignores her advice in both areas, Ritter willingly jumps right in to help him out of the trouble he has brought upon himself and literally bails Kelly out of the criminal charges she faces because of Stewart's obsessive behavior.

Thelma Ritter is always wise. But her wisdom is not of the intellectual variety and certainly not learned in any formal institution of education. She has instead acquired her wisdom as the result of innate intelligence, copious experience, and perceptive observation. She has the self-taught ability to penetrate beneath the surface of life and perceive its underlying reality. She is a self-trained psychologist with a thorough knowledge of human behavior and motivation.

In All About Eve, in which she plays Margo Channing's maid Birdie, herself a retired stage performer, she is the only one who is immediately suspicious of Eve Harrington, the seemingly adoring acolyte and protégée of the great actress. Everyone else accepts Eve's tale of her sad past and her idolatrous attitude toward Margo without question. Only Ritter openly expresses dubiety about Eve's motives, realizing that her harmless exterior actually conceals a devious and scheming nature.

Thelma Ritter is highly opinionated but rarely judgmental. She doesn't condemn anyone for honest failings, weakness, or bad decision-making. She knows that human beings are by nature flawed creatures, and she is enough of a realist to know how difficult it is for people to recognize and transcend their own shortcomings. As long as they are honest (or at least honestly self-deluded), she accepts others for what they are. It is pretense and dishonesty that she abhors. And she can detect and gauge insincerity like a Geiger counter measuring radioactivity.

In The Mating Season (a delightful romantic comedy directed by Mitchell Leisen that deserves to be better known) Ritter plays the mother of a loving but social-climbing son who is a junior executive engaged to a rich socialite. The owner of a money-losing hamburger stand, Ritter sells up without telling her son and travels to the town where he lives to surprise him. As soon as she arrives she can tell that he is apprehensive about the impression his unsophisticated, working-class mother will make on his fiancée, his employer, and his new social set. She doesn't seem to resent this, for although she knows that money and status have nothing to do with a person's worth, she knows enough about the world to accept that they are important to her son's social and career prospects. Later when the son's new wife innocently mistakes Ritter for her new cook, Ritter goes along with the mistake and persuades her reluctant son to join her in the deception. She genuinely likes her daughter-in-law, a naive and guileless young woman, and does all she can to help her manage the household, a task clearly beyond the bride's experience and capability.

When the daughter-in-law's domineering and flighty mother, played with drollery and quite convincing pettiness by Miriam Hopkins, shows up and attempts to seize control of the newlyweds and their household, Ritter recognizes a phony through and through. Here is a wicked mother-in-law motivated by self-interest and the desire to control her daughter's life for her own advantage. And unlike her daughter, Hopkins is condescending and bossy to Ritter. The battle lines for control of the newlyweds are drawn, but with Ritter's ability to deflect falsity and to direct genuine good will in others, the outcome is never in doubt.

Ritter is always selfless. She cares about others more than about herself and always puts their welfare before her own interests. Perhaps this helps explain why she usually seemed to play a character at the service of others—a maid, housekeeper, nurse, or cook—for she is a born helper. Reliability is essential to her nature; she never lets anybody down. And she is always protective of her charges, urging them in the right direction, giving them sage advice, and protecting them from themselves and others.

Ritter had perhaps the largest role of her career in The Model and the Marriage Broker. Although billed third, she is in every way the star of the movie. For once she is the prime mover in the plot, not a wise-cracking bystander whose function is to comment on the characters and action while they make it happen. In this George Cukor-directed movie, she plays the middle-aged owner of a marriage bureau. A self-employed small-business owner she may be, but even in her profession she devotes herself to helping others.

Unhappy in love herself in youth, she specializes in matchmaking for the hopeless and pathetic, exactly those most in need of her services. She departs from this pattern when she decides to find a mate for an attractive young model foolishly wasting her time on a married man. After many complications and misunderstandings, Ritter finally uses her skills to sort out and fix several relationships beset with problems, including the model's and that of the woman who stole her own husband from her years ago. In this case her selflessness pays off when she even succeeds in reviving her own dormant love life.

But Ritter's greatest professional triumph came in what is possibly her least typical role, a dramatic part in the cynical thriller Pickup on South Street. In a movie that is masterfully directed by Samuel Fuller and full of accomplished performances, including arguably the best ever by Richard Widmark, it is Ritter who in a supporting role creates what is for me the most indelible moments in a great film. She plays Moe, a down-and-out character just a step away from being a bag lady. Moe is a small-time street peddler and police informant. When the police want to locate a pickpocket (Widmark) who has stolen top-secret microfilm destined for spies from the purse of the villain's girlfriend, they go to Moe to find him.

Unfortunately, the villain (played with real menace by Richard Kiley) also goes to Moe for the same information. But Ritter has promised Widmark she will not betray him, and Ritter always honors her promises, even if she must die to keep her word. Ritter's demeanor during this encounter is a marvel. Completely gone is the typical Ritter resolve. Here she is a woman exhausted from a long and difficult life, a resigned woman who knows what lies in store for her and also knows that any opposition will be futile. She simply lies on the bed in her shabby rented room and offers no resistance as Kiley takes out his pistol. She looks in the other direction and waits for the inevitable to happen. The panning camera follows her gaze until she is out of the frame, and as a phonograph plays in the background we hear a single shot. In unexpectedly playing against type and appearing in a film quite different from her usual fare, Ritter transcended her own image and fashioned an unforgettable performance that seems all the more remarkable when considered in the context of her entire body of screen work.

Thelma Ritter received six Oscar nominations for Best Supporting Actress but never won. She did occasional work on television and continued to make a handful of feature films in the 1960's. But the heyday of her career was the 1950's. There has never been a character actress quite like her. She was one of those rare performers who are truly one of a kind, with an identifiable style and screen persona that nobody else can touch. For me she will always be the greatest character actress of all time.