“Scene Stealers” Archive
Gary Cahall | Scene Stealers
In a movie like 1980's Airplane!, where the jokes are zooming past viewers at a rate of several per minute and the starring cast includes veteran stars the likes of Lloyd Bridges, Leslie Nielsen and Robert Stack, it takes a special kind of performer to make a lasting impression in a supporting role. However, that's just what comic actor Stephen Stucker did in the role of the manic and--oh, how shall we say it?--flamboyant airport control room worker Johnny.
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Gary Cahall | Scene Stealers
Amid the taboo-shattering and polymorphously perverse chaos that is the John Waters universe, she was an oasis of...well, if not sanity, then certainly an off-kilter form of niceness. Few who have seen the director's landmark 1972 "exercise in poor taste," Pink Flamingos, can look at an order of deviled, hard-boiled or sunny-side-up eggs without thinking of the snaggletoothed grin, cackling laugh and one-in-a-million line delivery that were hallmarks of "Edie the Egg Lady," Edith Massey.
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Gary Cahall | Scene Stealers
It's a rare accomplishment for an actor or actress to receive an Academy Award nomination for their very first film appearance. It's even more rare for that first appearance to come at the rather advanced (for Hollywood) age of 61! But that's just what happened to Sydney Greenstreet, whose, shall we say, imposing presence and air of sophisticated menace served him well in a relatively brief nine-year career packed with memorable characters.
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Jason Marcewicz | Scene Stealers
One of the most recognizable character actors of the past three decades has to be Mike Starr. With his hulking 6'3" frame Mike cuts an imposing figure. As a result, much of his TV and film work have typecast him as a heavy, usually the muscle of mobsters. Says Mike: “I get a lot of calls for New York-oriented things, mob parts, cop roles. I think they stereotype me by size; that's a bit of a pitfall. Some people bring me in for the big gentle guy or these killers. It's hard to figure out what they think of me.”
But Mike’s versatility as an actor has not gone totally unnoticed by casting agents; nor by us movie geeks.
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Gary Cahall | Scene Stealers
Iconic low-budget filmmaker Roger Corman (article) is famous for the array of top directors--among them James Cameron, Francis Ford Coppola, Joe Dante, Ron Howard, and Martin Scorsese--who got some of their first breaks working for him at the American International and New World studios. But when it came to on-screen talent, one of the longest and most diverse careers to emerge from those humble B-movie breeding grounds must be that of craggy-faced actor Dick Miller, a Corman regular who would become a "good luck charm" for many of those future auteurs and a cult favorite.
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Gary Cahall | Scene Stealers
"I was never the 'babe,' so I knew I'd never get those big roles. I'd always be the best friend or the quirky sidekick." So said comedienne/actress Joan Cusack about a body of work that has garnered her many fans (including, in spite of the comment, her fair share of male admirers) and two Academy Award nominations, all for following in the Hollywood tradition of Joan Blondell, Eve Arden, Thelma Ritter, and others known for playing the heroine's wisecracking gal pal.
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Gary Cahall | Scene Stealers
She wasn't born into high society, but you'd never know it from most of her film appearances. With her nose firmly in the air, her upper-class dignity was constantly under attack by the relentless comic assaults of Groucho, Harpo, Chico, and sometimes Zeppo Marx. But for the indomitable Margaret Dumont, it was all in a day's work...even if she claimed to never get what was so funny.
She was born the Brooklynite Daisy Juliette Baker in October, 1882, and grew up in the south as the goddaughter of "Uncle Remus" author Joel Chandler Harris. While still in her teens she changed her name and began a stage career as an actress/singer, but gave it up after marrying a well-to-do sugar heir in 1910. Dumont returned to the boards following his death, and had her first film role as, appropriately, an aristocrat in a silent version of Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities.
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Gary Cahall | Scene Stealers
Of character actors it is often said, "I can't remember the name, but the face is familiar." That saying may have never been truer than in the case of Vincent Schiavelli, whose sad-eyed, hangdog features allowed him to easily move between comedic and dramatic roles and who was regularly seen in movies and on TV for over 35 years.
Born in Brooklyn in November, 1948 to an Italian-American family, Schiavelli studied drama at New York University and was active in stage work in the late '60s. His first screen appearance came in director Milos Forman's English-language debut feature, the 1971 counterculture satire Taking Off. The two must have hit it off, because the filmmaker would use Vincent in five more films, including turns as one of the hospital inmates in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, as F. Murray Abraham's valet in Amadeus, and as one of Woody Harrelson's cohorts in The People vs. Larry Flynt. A string of guest shots around the same time let TV audiences catch the actor in such popular series as Starsky and Hutch, Charlie's Angels, Taxi, and Moonlighting, where he played opposite future first wife Alyce Beasley.
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Tags: Character Actors