The Screengrab

It's been a long time since we've seen a new entry for That Guy!, the Screengrab's sporadic celebration of B-listers, character actors, and the working famous.  So who better to mark our return than one of the most enjoyable contemporary character actors?  Robert William Hoskins, the short, broad Cockney from Bury St. Edmonds, is one of England's most beloved actors -- quite unusual given that he's never had an acting lesson and his first role came purely by accident.  At the time, Hoskins was seeking a career as a writer, and supported himself, like most failed artists, by working odd jobs -- in this case, as a warehouse worker.  Showing up drunk and a theater to collect a friend who was auditioning for the lead, he was clowning around in the audience and, mistaken for one of the hopefuls by the casting director, he acquitted himself marvelously in the audition and got the part.  It cost him a friend, but it launched one of the richest careers in modern British cinema.  At 5'6", stout, and with an unmistakable working-class accent and demeanor, Hoskins is rarely the best-looking man in the room, even when he's alone; but he's parlayed his unusual appearance and forceful personality into some electrifying roles.  At first known for his ability to play intense and sometimes brutal criminals and assorted villains, he later convinced his agents that he was more diverse than his resume indicated and soon showed an exceptional gift for comedy as well, both verbal and physical.  His big break came in 1980, when, after a number of high-profile television appearances, he netted the lead role in The Long Good Friday (about which see below); it proved to be a turning point in his career, and he's worked steadily ever since, rarely in a lead role but always worth watching (well, maybe with the exception of Super Mario Brothers).  With both blockbuster films and small independent movies to his credit, Hoskins has proven his diversity, and even now, at age 65, he gets offers that men half his age would envy.  Curiously, he has played a number of political leaders from the 1940s and 1950s in his storied career:  Churchhill, Mussolini, Krushchev, and Soviet secret police killer Lavrent Beria.  Of this phenomenon, Hoskins has said, with typical self-deprecation, "Most dictators were short, fat, middle-aged and hairless.  Besides Danny DeVito, there's only me to play them."

Where to see Bob Hoskins at his best:

THE LONG GOOD FRIDAY (1980)

Hoskins' breakout film role came in this gripping, suspenseful gangster movie, which he earned by a stellar performance in Dennis Potter's fantastic television mini-series Pennies from Heaven.  Playing Harold Shand, a short-tempered and violent British gangster, Hoskins is endlessly fascinating to watch:  his character, used to being in complete control, is a textbook case of slow, angry boil as his world begins to completely unravel on what should be the occasion of his greatest triumph.  Watching Shand fall to pieces as he thrashes about helplessly, trying to find out who is out to destroy him and why, is one the greatest treats the gangster genre has to offer.

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Almost as deadly for an actor as a face made for radio is a style made for theater.  An actor who is thought of primarily as a stage presence will often be considered either too overblown and theatrical for film, from years of playing to the back row, or too subtle and mannered to have the kind of dynamic charisma one looks for in the image-intensive medium of motion pictures.  Occasionally, though, a highly praised stage actor breaks through in film and establishes himself as the class of his field, and if Wales' Jonathan Pryce lacks the good looks and intensity of a Laurence Olivier, he has at least managed — largely due to his longtime association with the troubled, talented director Terry Gilliam — to become one of the most skillful and reliable character actors working today.   A veteran of RADA (on an acting scholarship) and the former artistic director of the celebrated Liverpool Everyman Theater, Pryce's stage credentials are impeccable, but he's also a stalwart movie veteran who's appeared in everything from James Bond movies (he played the main villain in 1997's Tomorrow Never Dies, opposite Pierce Brosnan) to summer blockbusters (he's been the Don Knotts-esque governor of Jamaica, Weatherby Swann, in all three installments of the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise).  But despite these occasional gestures at superstardom, he's most at home assaying highly distinctive and memorable character roles, even imbuing his occasional lead performance with a nervous energy and sublime competence that comes straight out of his theatrical training and perfectly feeds into his on-screen persona.

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Genre films are something of a trap for actors and actresses.  One memorable role in a movie franchise beloved by one flavor of geek or another, and they're pretty much set for life -- as long as sequels keep getting made, they'll keep getting steady work, and the sun will set on their acting careers about five weeks after they die.  On the other hand, as long as they're best known for genre parts, those are the parts they're likely to keep getting ad infinitum; there's a reason it's called the genre ghetto.  Unfortunately, actors who take up residence there are awfully reluctant to leave because the paychecks are good, but they soon find out it's not easy even when they decide to move to a ritzier neighborhood.  More than a few actors of some talent and range have found themselves, after cashing in off of a big genre-character role, being judged for the rest of their careers not on how well they can act, but how well they can still fit into their old costumes.  Such an actor is the big, hearty Welshman John Rhys Davies:  a man of impressive range and flawless credentials playing the classics on stage, his portrayal of a handful of unforgettable characters in sci-fi and fantasy films has somewhat derailed his career while at the same time ensuring that he'll always have work.  He's gone from being the poor man's Brian Blessed to being one of the innumerable people who pays for his house by spending half the year in New Zealand filming syndicated sci-fi television shows.

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That Guy! tends to focus on beloved or quirky character actors, but there's a different species of That Guy! who's just as worthy of attention: the so-called "working famous". These are actors and actresses who aren't especially noteworthy for character parts, quirky looks, or distinctive voices; they're normal-looking men and women who seem like they're perfectly capable of filling leading roles, but never quite make it to the upper echelons of stardom and spend long and often rich careers constantly working in Hollywood without ever becoming household names. Scott Wilson, one of our favorite examples of the working famous, seemed like he was destined for superstardom; after taking up acting more or less on whim after hitch-hiking to Los Angeles from his native Georgia, he starred in two groundbreaking films at the age of twenty-five. . .

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All throughout Black History Month in February, the Screengrab's That Guy! feature will be taking a look at some of Hollywood's finest African-American character actors. Last week we focused on Ving Rhames, and this week, we're taking a look at the man recently voted Most Likely To Be Mistaken For Ving Rhames: Delroy Lindo. Born in London to a family of Jamaican ancestry, Lindo's facial similarities to Rhames, along with his powerful physique and tendency to portray gangsters, drug dealers and other low-lifes, has often led to confusion between the two. But while Rhames' on-screen style is smooth, calculating and understated, Lindo tends towards the edgy, the explosive, the half-mad. After making his first major film (More American Graffiti) in 1979, Delroy Lindo didn't make another film for a decade, preferring to focus on the stage roles to which he still occasionally returns; he earned widespread praise (and Tony nominations) for his work in Athol Fugard's Master Harold and the Boys and Joe Turner's Come and Gone. When he finally returned to the big screen, he found his biggest proponent in America's most prominent black director: Spike Lee cast him in a number of memorable roles, and even handed him the role of family man Woody Carmichael in Crooklyn — a thinly veiled portrait of Lee's own father.

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That Guy!'s salute to Black History Month continues with a look at one of our favorite contemporary African-American character actors, Ving Rhames. A powerfully built six-footer with an intimidating mein and a penchant for playing bruisers and bad-asses, Rhames is in fact one of Hollywood's most notorious nice guys, a deeply spiritual and profoundly humanitarian person with a reputation in America's most backstabbing town for always being the touch for someone in need. Born with the substantially less intimidating Christian name of "Irving" in 1959, Rhames picked up his stage name not from the mean streets of his native Harlem, but from the decidedly non-superfly Stanley Tucci, a classmate of his at SUNY-Purchase. After formative experiences at the High School of Performing Arts and on Broadway, he launched a successful film career in the mid-1990s and has gone on to become something of a go-to guy for casting directors looking for a deft blend of intimidation and intelligence. (Which is not to say that his film career is nothing but bluster: he not only played a drag queen in a TV movie entitled Holiday Heart, but recently appeared in the excrable I Now Pronounce You Chuck And Larry, singing "I'm Every Woman" while naked in a locker room full of men.)

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A lifetime of playing character roles may not have exactly made Yaphet Kotto into Hollywood royalty; but he doesn't have to settle. He's the real thing: though a lifelong New Yorker, Kotto is the son of a genuine Cameroonian prince, the great-grandson of the king of the Douala people in the late 1800s, and (according to the man himself — and are you going to call Yaphet Kotto a liar?), the great-great-great-grandson of Queen Victoria. That ought to get him a seat on the House of Lords and nice swanky country estate, but until his relatives stop treating him like, er, the black sheep of the family, he'll have to keep on being one of our all-time favorite African-American character actors. It's easy to see why Kotto is often cast as a soldier or a tough cop: even at age seventy, he struts through life in his powerfully built 6'4"-inch frame looking as if he owns the place. Although he resembles nothing less than a real-life John Shaft, with his strong features and a wide grin that hovers between gregarious and feral, he hasn't always had an easy time of it: in addition to being born with the wrong color skin to make it as a Hollywood superstar in the '50s and '60s, Yaphet Kotto is also a devout Jew, going back generations to his African roots.

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