If you've been to the movies a few times in the last twenty years, you've probably seen Richard Jenkins. Trust me. Jenkins isn't a household name, and he doesn't really have a household appearance, either: he's tall, bald, and bland-looking, and at 60 doesn't appear all that different from when he first started popping up in movies, in such roles as the doctor in Hannah and Her Sisters who gently breaks its to the hypochondriac played by Woody Allen that he doesn't have a malignant brain tumor. Yet Jenkins is a crackerjack actor, capable of using what God gave him to surprising effect. His ability to suggest something cracked or wild inside a businesslike frame has made him a favorite of such directors as the Coens and the Farrellys, and David O. Russell, who used him in Flirting with Disaster as an FBI agent who wanted to adopt a baby to raise with his professional partner and lover, Josh Brolin. His best-known role may be the patriarchal undertaker in the HBO Six Feet Under, where his character was dead from the start of the series and still usually seemed to be the only person on the show who was having a good time. In the new movie The Visitor, which was written and directed by Thomas McCarthy, Jenkins has his shot at carrying a movie, playing a widowed economics professor who has disappeared inside his own orderly world.
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