February is Black History Month, and since we enjoyed combing through the stacks in preparation for last week's featured That Guy!, Yaphet Kotto, we figured we'd continue on in that vein and take a look at some of Hollywood's finest African-American character actors. We've discussed before how it's much harder for a woman to make a reputation playing character roles; actresses tend to be valued more for their looks than their acting skills, and women who aren't traditionally beautiful have far fewer opportunities to build a career based on their chops and personalities than do men who aren't conventionally handsome. Similarly, it may actually be easier for African-Americans to become character actors, for no other reason than for a very long time, leading man roles were generally denied to them. With his commanding demeanor, strong and handsome face and forceful personality, there's no reason that Larry Fishburne shouldn't have become one of Hollywood's biggest stars, and for a brief period in the early 1990s, it seemed like he would be — but for various reasons, it became clear that even at that late date, the movie business had only one opening for Serious Black Superstar, and it was already being filled by Denzel Washington. (It still is, for that matter.)

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You know, folks, it's really not my intention for this feature to just go through a list of everyone who's ever worked with the Coen Brothers or appeared in Buckaroo Banzai, but that's the way it seems to be shaking down.  Some people just share my appreciation of freaky-looking middle-aged guys who behave eccentrically, I suppose.  Anyway, Dan Hedaya's first movie role was in Myra Breckenridge, but don't hold that against him:  not only did he go one to have a beloved television career, most prominently as the dull-witted Nick Tortelli on Cheers, but he's also appeared in nearly a hundred movies, usually as some variety of dolt or sleazebag.  1999 saw him combine the two, playing doltish sleazebag Richard M. Nixon in Dick and fulfilling a sort of physical destiny:  with his weighty jowls, shifty eyes, and perpetual five-o'-clock shadow, he's a near spitting image of the Tricky One.  Born to a family of Syrian Jews in Brooklyn, Hedaya taught junior high school science for a number of years before his acting career took off; his shuffling demeanor and absent-minded craziness is certainly reminiscient of more than a few science teachers we can remember from our own school years.  Outside of television, the role which Hedaya made the biggest impact was that of Alicia Silverstone's wealthy father in Clueless; he also stole the show in the overblown, overpriced movie version of The Addams Family as Gomez's crooked, shiftless attorney, Tully Alford.  Recently, as he closes out his sixties, he's specialized in playing the fathers of characters as eccentric as he is:  he was Amy Sedaris' dad in the big-screen adaptation of Strangers with Candy, the patriarch of the Butabi Brothers in the dismal SNL spin-off A Night at the the Roxbury, and the father of the obsessive-compulsive detective played by Tony Shalhoub in Monk.  His recent appearance in the controversial TV series The Book of Daniel shows that he won't stop shuffling into strange roles anytime soon.

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Okay, that's enough of the artsy-fartsy European creeps.  Let's get back to America!  And they don't come much American-er than Big Steve Root, one of the most prolific character actors in the business today.  For a guy whose first film role featured him unseen in a toilet (although, considering the movie was Crocodile Dundee II, maybe it's just as well), Stephen Root has a rather highbrow acting background:  for years prior to the kick-off of a remarkably rich film and television career, he was a respected member of the National Shakespeare Company.  His first major recognition as an actor came when he portrayed the flighty, meddling billionaire Jimmy James as part of the high-powered cast of NewsRadio, and even with dozens of film roles to his credit, he's probably best-known -- and best-paid -- for that role and his voice-over work on King of the Hill, where he plays, among other roles, the hapless Bill Dauterive.  A number of directors have enjoyed his work enough to make him a regular member of their repertory companies, particularly Mike Judge, Kevin Smith, and the Coen Brothers; Root's ability to play extremely eccentric roles while never giving the same characterization twice makes him especially sought-after by directors who specialize in character roles, and Root admitted in a recent interview that being killed by the Coens (as he, or at least his character, is in No Country for Old Men) has been the high point of his career to date.  Having just celebrated his 56th birthday, Root -- who, to be perfectly honest, looks like he's been playing a 56-year-old for the lion's share of his career -- no doubt has plenty of years ahead of him both on the big screen, playing his specialty of suit-wearing middlemen who have something extremely wrong with them, and in voice-over, where he's proven to have exceptional talent.  And with most of his comedic work for television widely available on DVD, a case can be made for Stephen Root as the preeminent comic character actor of the 1990s.

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After months of doing this feature, we started to wonder:  are we being Europhobic?  Are our America-centric viewing habits getting the best of us?  Are countless Frenchmen, Germans, and Italians snubbing our film blog because of our unwillingness to feature beloved character actors from the Continent in That Guy!?  Well, that ends today.  For today we feature, as the lead singer of Korn gracefully put it, "the man with the fucked-up eyes":  Mr. Udo Kier.  Wherever he goes, Udo (as is befitting a man named Udo) is a candidate for the strangest man in the country.  He has played a vampire or a zombie at least a dozen times, and he is likely the only actor in the history of the world to have appeared in films by Gus van Sant, Ranier Werner Fassbinder, Lars von Trier, Andy Warhol, and Rob Zombie.  Resembling nothing so much as a Helmut Newton photograph come to some semblance of three-dimensional life, Udo Kier -- who was born in Germany and almost died hours later when Allied bombers pulverized the hospital in which he was born -- cannot rightly be called a character actor so much as he can a cult actor.  Whether he's going to be a leader or a member of that cult depends on the role.  Truth be told, Udo isn't even one of the finer actors we've featured in this space; his presence in a film isn't so much a promise of a gripping performance to come as it is a dire warning that something very, very fucked up is about to happen.  He's appeared in a staggering number of films -- as many as 150 at last count -- and it is putting it extremely mildly to say that they range greatly in quality.  He was in Berlin Alexanderplatz; he was also in Spermula, a movie that we assure you we are not making up.  He was in Dogville; he was also in Barb Wire.  He has worked with some of the most talented American and European directors of the last half-century; he also put on a spanking costume and posed in Madonna's "Sex" book, and smeared fresh animal offal over his face at the behest of Paul Morrisey.  What will he do next?  Believe us when we say that a man who has been directed by both Quentin Tarantino and Uwe Boll within the last year is capable of anything.

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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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If Miriam Margolyes had never appeared in a single film, she would still have a special place in the history of British television. While attending Oxford University, she appeared on the game show University Challenge, and, after getting a question wrong during a live broadcast, had the dubious distinction of being the first person to say "fuck" on the British airwaves. Luckily for filmgoers, though, she didn't let the shame destroy her career, and has gone on to become one of the most sought-after character actresses in the English film industry. A veteran of a number of television gigs, like former That Gal! Natasha Richardson, she was a regular on The Black Adder (including a memorable portrayal of Queen Victoria), but it's on film where she's shone the brightest.

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Korean-American actor Steve Park doesn't have the robust résumé that some of the people we've featured in this column can claim. Whose fault that is makes for a fascinating question — one that Park has had the courage to ask, which may in itself constitute the answer. Park is a gifted and emotionally open actor who's likewise a talented comedian; he was a series regular on In Living Color, where he met and married his wife, actress Kelly Coffield, and while the show didn't serve as a springboard to huge fame the way it did his fellow cast member Jim Carrey, he likewise didn't become synonymous with shrill, joke-free comedies, and got to ply his trade in a number of TV sitcoms without half the country cringing at the mere mention of his name. In 1996, coming off of his greatest screen performance, he was accorded the rare opportunity to become a guest star on Friends — at the time the highest-rated show on television, and one which, by no means coincidentally, was coming under some criticism for its portrayal of contemporary New York as a lily-white yuppie enclave no more ethnically robust than Omaha, Nebraska. While filming his episodes, Park witnessed an ugly racial incident involving the crew, and detected a certain callousness and arrogance in his fellow actors; and, rather than do what 99% of Hollywood would do in that situation — keep his mouth shut and collect his paycheck — he chose instead to pen a deeply felt and brutally honest article called "Struggling for Dignity," in which he attacked the industry for its retrograde views of Asian-Americans and its highest-paid stars for ignoring the often brutal and inhumane treatment of their lesser-known fellows.

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It's no secret that the selection of a That Guy! is a highly personal thing. I play favorites in this space, and make no apologies. There's nothing objective about why I'll pick a Tom Atkins but eschew a Burt Young — it's as simple as one appealing to me on a certain level and the other leaving me as cold as a glass of raw eggs. Everyone has their preferences when it comes to character actors, and finding agreement on the subject is harder than getting a group of a dozen movie critics to agree on a Coen Brothers film. Of course, every rule has its exceptions, and if there's ever been anyone with a bad word to say about Philip Baker Hall, I've never met them (and they better hope I don't, particularly in a dark alley, and with a couple of boxes of Sno-Caps in me). It's astonishing to consider that Hall is seventy-six years old — not because he doesn't look it, with his worn, lined face, perpetually plastered-down hair and eyes that droop with a combination of sadness and intelligence — but because he's looked that way for at least twenty years. The common perception that he sprung into the world fully formed, like Athena, from the imagination of Paul Thomas Anderson, ignores a film career that goes back almost five decades — not that it wasn't largely worth ignoring before he crossed paths with Robert Altman, who gave him a role that would forever grant him one of the all-time great film performances in history even if he'd never made another movie.

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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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We’ve discussed in this space before the fact that it’s a lot easier to build a career as a character actor if you’re a man than it is if you’re a woman. Even in today’s Hollywood — or should I say, especially in today’s Hollywood — men are allowed to be quirky, unattractive, unconventionally charismatic; while women are allowed to be beautiful. It’s hard to develop a reputation for playing smart, idiosyncratic characters with unusual looks in a town where Britney Spears and Kate Winslet are considered grotesquely overweight. Still, you really don’t appreciate how bad things can be until you consider the fact that one of the movie business’ most talented actresses won her only Academy Award. . . for playing a man. Diminutive, husky-voiced New Jersey native Linda Hunt was clearly never going to be a big-screen superstar; her throaty, almost masculine vocal tone and 4'9" frame seemed to guarantee that if she got work it all, it would be in gimmick roles and stunt casting. But director Peter Weir saw enough genuine talent in her to give her the role of guide and photographer Billy Kwan in his 1982 political drama The Year of Living Dangerously; her towering performance was enough to get her an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. Unlike other pieces of gender-bending casting trickery like Hilary Swank in Boys Don’t Cry or Felicity Huffman in TransAmerica, there was nothing artificial or calculating in the role: Hunt took a professional approach towards playing a man, and fully inhabited the part in a way that continues to impress twenty-five years after it was filmed. She’s never quite gotten out of the habit of playing men — her most recent memorable role was as the putatively male "Management" in the ambitious HBO failure Carnivalé — but she’s turned in plenty of terrific performances, in the intervening years, in her native gender. As the years go by, roles in animation and video games — the boon of the contemporary character actor, and a natural for someone with as distinctive a voice as Hunt’s — have become more common. But a woman with talents this prodigious, however small a package contains them, has got at least a few great big-screen roles left in her; maybe she’ll become the first person to win Academy Awards for both genders.

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Miguel Ferrer had some big shoes to fill before he was even old enough to walk. His father was the Oscar-winning actor José Ferrer; his mother was recording star Rosemary Clooney. His oldest childhood friend is Carrie Fisher, his sister-in-law is Debbie Boone, and his cousin is George Clooney. With expectations that high, it’s probably no surprise that he shied away from the intense pressures of film work and found his niche as a television actor; he’s just signed on to a recurring role in the Bionic Woman remake, but he’s also turned in memorable TV roles in Miami Vice, Twin Peaks, Tales from the Crypt, Crossing Jordan and LateLine (as well as, er, less grand projects like Kung Fu: The Next Generation). He’s also won acclaim as a voiceover actor, doing everything from Disney (he was a featured actor in Mulan) to superheroes (a lifelong comics buff, he’s been in several Superman animated episodes and will play a prominent role in the upcoming New Frontier Justice League cartoon) to video games (he plays the lead in BioShock, one of the moodiest, most dramatic, and immersively cinematic games in history). Ferrer didn’t initially want to be an actor at all; turned off by the hyper-competitive nature of the film industry, he was originally a respected studio drummer (playing alongside the legendary Keith Moon in one memorable session) and took his first acting job only because childhood friend — and current bandmate, in the Jenerators — Billy Mumy talked him into it. Twenty-five years later, Ferrer, whose reputation for playing short-tempered, hotheaded jerks belies his abilities as an extremely versatile actor who can handle as much emotional range as he’s given, has become one of an elite group of television actors whose very appearance in the credits is good enough cause to give a show a chance.  But despite his infrequent big-screen appearances, he’s still done enough with his few and far-between movie roles to make him a That Guy! favorite.

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Baseball season is nearing an end, which means that so, too, is my chance to watch TV commercials. I’m not much of a television watcher (well, I watch a lot of TV, but mostly on DVD), and about the only time I get a chance to see mainstream commercials is before a feature at a movie theatre, or during baseball season. That’s just fine with me; the things rarely live up to the standards of either high art or low camp, so I don’t feel like I’m missing much. Imagine, then, my surprise when a commercial for Traveler’s Insurance cropped up during a Red Sox-Cleveland playoff game featuring one of my all-time favorite character actors: this week’s That Guy!, Richard Edson. It’s actually a pretty good bit of casting, for a commercial – who better to embody Risk, the very personification of bad luck, than the laconic, hangdog Edson? His long, weary face (almost always sporting a mustache of one kind or another) and perpetual look of a wheedling cajoler has made me a longtime fan of his infrequent movie roles; he’s not the most prolific actor out there, but he tends to steal the show whenever he shows up.

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This week’s That Guy!, the long-awaited Xander Berkeley, is a groundbreaker in many ways. He’s the first character actor we’ve featured in this spot whose name starts with an X; he’s also the first to have designed his own my-skin-is-falling-off makeup while portraying a person suffering from acute radiation poisoning. But he also follows in some well-traveled paths: he’s the second person we’ve featured to have come to prominence as a cast member of 24, a show that seems to specialize in snatching up talented Hollywood character actors, as evidenced by previous That Gal! Mary Lynn Rajskub and future That Guy! Dennis Haysbert. Like a lot of other contemporary character actors, he’s found steady work as a voiceover specialist (appearing, as has almost every other B-lister in the business, on the Justice League cartoon), and he bankrolls artsy projects like his back-to-back appearances in Timecode and The Cherry Orchard with, er, slightly more pedestrian fare like Barb Wire and The Rock. A favorite of maverick director Alex Cox, Berkeley appeared in three of his films in a row early in his career. His first role was as a grown-up Chris Crawford in the infamous Mommie Dearest, and he’s gone on to make almost seventy feature films in twenty years (his most recent was Seraphim Falls), qualifying him as one of the hardest-working men in show business despite being almost completely unknown to most people who don’t watch 24. Berkeley, a New Yorker by way of Jersey, has specialized, in his latter days, in bland, arrogant schmucks who are up to no good. But he's displayed a terrific range in his remarkably prolific career, playing everything from typical romantic male leads to scene-stealing darkly comic turns, as in his cameo role as a cab driver in Leaving Las Vegas. He’s also almost certainly the only actor we’ve ever featured who has portrayed an eight-armed violinist who robs banks alongside a robotic Soviet vending machine.

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