The Screengrab

In all of our occasional looks back at great character actors of the past, we've never written about anyone as universally beloved as Peter Boyle.  The husky Irish-American with the wry smile worked, during his forty-year career, in everything from quiet, thoughtful little independent films to blockbuster sitcoms, but despite a number of controversial positions in his private life and the friendship of some of the entertainment industry's most despised liberals (he was a close friend to both John Lennon and Jane Fonda), the American public always took him to heart, and it's impossible to find anyone he worked with that doesn't remember him fondly after his death in 2006.  

Originally intending to enter the priesthood, Boyle was bitten by the acting bug early on (his father hosted a children's show in his native Pennsylvania) and after a few minor roles on film and television, hit it big with his lead performance in 1970's Joe.  Although he did a tremendous job as a racist factory worker and the breakthrough role opened doors for him, Boyle was deeply shaken by the role:  attending his first screening of the film, he was disturbed to hear people cheering the character's reactionary lines, and was extremely selective about choosing his parts from then on.  In fact, it's ironic that some of Boyle's most memorable roles have been those of violent, brutal men; the actor himself was, by all accounts, an extremely gentle man, a liberal, and a lifelong pacifist who opposed the war in Vietnam, championed civil rights, and worried constantly about the impact of his performances as brutes, thugs and killers.  But his career was also peppered with some extremely adept comic performances, and his greatest success came as a cast member of the highly successful situation comedy Everybody Loves Raymond.  He also did some top-flight work in other television dramas, including a swell turn as Fatso Judson in the TV movie adaptation of From Here to Eternity and a lead role in the short-lived but extremely well-made cop show Joe Bash.  But it was on the big screen that he had the greatest impact; his odd features and quirky approach ensured that he'd never be a leading man, but he absolutely barnstormed every character role he was given.  Although we'll list our favorites below, everyone remembers Boyle fondly from a different performance, and he's sure to go down in history as not just one of the best, but one of the best-loved, character actors in Hollywood.

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As character actors go, they don't come much more iconic than Warren Mercer Oates. A tall Marine Corps vet from rural Kentucky's Muhlenberg County, Oates came west in the 1950s and, after working a number of menial jobs, started to get a string of acting jobs in western movies and televisions shows, thanks largely to his hunched six-foot frame, throwback looks, and thick rustic accent. But it was his acting chops that won him the attention of some of Hollywood's greatest directors; over the years, he worked with, among others, Norman Jewison, Monte Hellman, Stephen Spielberg, John Milius, William Friedkin, Terrence Malick, and Philip Kaufman. But it was with Sam Peckinpah that Oates found his greatest success; the two shared a no-nonsense approach to filmmaking and a similiarly straightforward (and sometimes abrasive) personality. After first working together on Ride the High Country, Peckinpah and Oates worked together repeatedly over the years, and Peckinpah even gave Oates one of his few leading man roles in the controversial and underrated Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. Extremely prolific during his 25 years in Hollywood, Warren Oates and his sneering, crooked smile became one of the few character actors as immediately recognizable as many lead actors of his day. Sadly for the many fans of this gifted actor and storyteller, he didn't live to enjoy his greatest success: he died unexpectedly of a heart attack just months after completing Stripes. His role as the straight-edge Sgt. Hulka won him legions of new fans and scored him more money than he'd made in any of his previous movies, but he would make only three more films, both of which were released after his death. Since then, a posthumous cult has grown up around Warren Oates, and it's hard not to read various bits of casting without imagining what he'd do with the role. Luckily, he left us with a lot of good work to chew on.

Where to see Warren Oates at his best:

THE WILD BUNCH (1969)

Outside of Stripes, Warren Oates' best-known, and most beloved, film role is that of the bandit Lyle Gorch in Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch. Gorch combines Oates' two most common roles in western genre pictures — the craven and the brute — into an incredibly memorable, whore-chasing, washer-stealing character.

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Like his fellow New Yorker and paisan Joe Spinell, Vincent Schiavelli was a tremendous character actor with a distinctive appearance and a wide range who died far too young. Before succumbing to cancer in 2005 — complicated by a lifelong struggle with Marfan syndrome, which contributed to his distinctive appearance — Schiavelli was an incredibly prolific character actor who appeared in over a hundred films and nearly as many television shows over a thirty-year career. Easily remembered for his hangdog expressions, drooping eyes, frazzled hair and looming height, Schiavelli was also capable of playing a wide gamut of roles; though he was usually cast in comedies, he was equally adept with drama, action and even voice-over work, as his frequent appearance in video games and animation proved. Schiavelli was also renowned as a gourmet cook, writing three books on Italian cuisine and a number of articles in food magazines, all of which contributed to his winning a prestigious James Beard award in 2001. In his latter years, Schiavelli moved to Sicily, where he wrote, produced, directed and starred in a number of plays for the local theatre, and endeared himself to the locals in his father's homeland by speaking the native dialect to perfection.

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It’s easy to pick legendary character actors of Hollywood’s Golden Age to profile in this feature; much harder is selecting actors who died too young and who, by all rights, should still be with us, making movies. Joe Spinell is one of those. Born Joseph Spagnuolo in 1936, the burly Manhattanite changed his name to make things easy on the casting directors who called him all too infrequently, making him reliant on low-paying night jobs like driving a taxi or working the counter at a seedy liquor store. There was nothing calculated or contrived about his Spinell’s frequent portrayals of tough-guy New Yorkers; he grew up hard and worked for a decade with the Theater of the Forgotten, a troupe that performed exclusively for prison inmates. Spinell’s first big break came in 1972, when he was cast (based almost exclusively on his thuggish looks and his inimitable accent) in a very minor role in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather. Coppola liked him so much that he specifically expanded the role of Willie Cicci to give Spinell more screen time in the sequel.

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