When I started writing about character actors, everyone I know who knows movies and actors asked me if I was writing about Thelma Ritter. There’s royalty to that, a kind of character actor superstardom. It also made me not want to write about Thelma Ritter, since I’ve been resisting the grains of pressure and expectation since I was young enough to know who Thelma Ritter was, which would have been around seven or so. My parents loved movies, and my brother and I followed suit, for many years absorbing whatever was available on the five channels of our black-and-white and then wobbly color TV in Brooklyn in the ’60s, and then—still my brother and I—bounding into Manhattan on the D or F trains, to the art cinemas and revival houses in the early and mid-1970s, for many of us a kind of cinematic utopia, temporally, geographically, and historically.
To the point: I grew up a casual cinephile, the way you love things seemingly as a matter of course, and only later are spurred to understand them more deeply: things like family, history, and cinema. Part of my sentimental education was the recognition and appreciation of character actors. This has stayed with me. Character actors frequently have—or at least in the studio system of the Dream Factory had—long careers, careers that tended to follow one of two models: They brought an indelible character with them from film to film, so could make an impression quickly, registering a familiar set of characteristics with the audience simply, after a time, by appearing. Or their essential personality was effaced as they disappeared into each new role. The cast of characters I’ve written about here, all of whom I have watched since my childhood, follows the limitations of the Dream Factory demographically—it was only after the breakup of the studio system that Hollywood’s character base widened in terms of color, fuller possibilities of gender and sexuality, wider and wilder representations of behavior. But that misfortune, too, led to sometimes fascinating “coded” behaviors in the contours of the system of the Code.
Kierkegaard writes that character is “‘engraved,’ deeply etched.” And we sense the character of certain character actors etched into what they carry with them. On the other hand, some character actors blend chameleon-like into a variety of roles, utility performers who step in and can be almost anything needed, repressing their own personalities. In Kierkegaardian terms, they erase, efface. Leading actors also share these templates: Bette Davis could be Queen Victoria or Margo Channing, Charlotte Vale (Now, Voyager) or Charlotte Hollis (Hush, Hush Sweet Charlotte), a range that would make Gary Cooper cry. Gary Cooper brought a reasonably stable set of characteristics to his roles, which, as Dorothy Parker said of Katherine Hepburn, “ran the gamut of emotions from A to B.”
My interest in character actors might be the same as your interest in the gravediggers, or Rosencrantz and Guildenstern: I grew used to paying attention to them and wondering who they were, elaborating their stories. Have you ever watched a film and just focused on the supporting actors? It’s an entirely interesting, if slightly surreal exercise. As a child who felt as though he were destined to play a supporting role, a watching role, I starting looking at how Edward Everett Horton was looking at Fred Astaire, how Mike Mazurki was looking at Tyrone Power, or how, yes, Thelma Ritter was looking at James Stewart. The action, it seemed to me, was on the sidelines. That’s where people said more interesting things (character actors could be given lines that evaded the Code, the strict regulating of Hollywood’s moral and political presentations in film by the Hayes Motion Picture Code, starting in 1934) simply because less attention was paid to what they said and did. You, meaning I, learned this if you watched closely enough. Did she/he really say that? Did Eve Arden really get away with that? It made character actors intimately and ultimately more interesting to me.
So these essays are my homage, and my attempt to dive under the surface of my long love of character actors. Character actors play with our sense of not just what a character is but what character is: what defines individual nature, what qualities create a persona, and how demonstrable or latent, how closely guarded the inner life can be. All questions that interest me. And I hope you, enough so that perhaps you’re tempted to watch Thelma Ritter, with her greatest of cinematic New York accents.