Schirmer Encyclopedia of Film

Character Actors
public also embraced actors who looked like people they
might know in life, especially after the coming of sound
brought scores of stage actors before the cameras and a
more realistic aesthetic to the cinema. The top box-office
star for two years in the early 1930s was Marie Dressler
(1868–1934), an earthy and homely actress in her sixties.
Also during the early talkie era, when acting experience
seemed briefly to matter more than looks, the Academy
Awards Ò for Best Actor went to the elderly thespian
George Arliss (1868–1946) and to such expressive but
physically ungainly talents as Wallace Beery (1885–1949)
and Charles Laughton. Even the matinee idol Fredric
March (1897–1975) tied with Beery for the 1931–1932
Best Actor award by playing leading man and character
actor in a single film: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
Therefore, when journalistic accounts of the late
1960s and early 1970s tried to describe such unglamorous
lead actors as Dustin Hoffman (b. 1937), Gene
Hackman (b. 1930), and Al Pacino (b. 1940) as examples
of the ‘‘character actor as star,’’ the idea was not new. Yet
it always seems exceptional, especially after several decades
of the studio system when glamorous stars were
backed up by platoons of ordinary looking but prodigiously
talented actors and actresses. Comparing the
making of a film to the building of a table, director
Frank Capra (1897–1991) said, ‘‘On the top of my table,
which is bright and shiny, I have these lovely dolls that
are my leading actors and actresses. But it is not a table
until I put legs under it, and those are my character
people. That’s what holds my picture up’’ (Davis, The
Glamour Factory, pp. 122–123).
During the studio era, the appearance of certain
character actors was as much a mark of high-quality
moviemaking as lavish production values or prestigious
story properties. Some character players were as identified
with a single studio as the stars were. Peter Lorre (1904–
1964) or Sidney Greenstreet (1879–1954), inevitably
meant that the movie they were in was from Warner
Bros.; the appearance (except when they were loaned
out) of Jane Darwell (1879–1967), Celeste Holm
(b. 1919), or Charles Coburn (1877–1961) meant
Twentieth Century Fox; Frank Morgan (1890–1949) or
Louis Calhern (1895–1956) signaled an MGM picture.
Others showed up in the films of any number of production
companies in a single year. These were the actors
like Porter Hall (1888–1953), Beulah Bondi (1888–
1981), Gene Lockhart (1891–1957), and Henry
Travers (1874–1965) who appeared in film after film in
the studio period but were not tied to a particular studio.
Other national cinemas had essential ‘‘character people’’
as well. The French films of the 1930s are as unimaginable
without such stalwarts as Jules Berry (1883–1951) or
Marcel Dalio (1900–1983) (who later worked extensively
in Hollywood) as American films would be without Eve
Arden (1908–1990) or Edward Everett Horton (1886–
1970).
Examples of the value of character actors are legion.
In 1939, when Hollywood produced an unparalleled
number of classic films, half of them seemed to feature
Thomas Mitchell (1892–1962), who played prominent
roles that year in Stagecoach, Gone with the Wind, Only
Angels Have Wings, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and
The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Despite his seemingly
ubiquitous presence in films throughout the 1930s and
1940s, Mitchell, like other Hollywood character actors,
returned periodically to the stage; in the 1950s he also
became a fixture of TV drama anthology programs, live
or filmed, leading the parade of actors below the starlevel
who streamed from the fading movie studios to the
opportunities offered by the new medium.
As an example of the importance of character actors
to the texture, rhythm, and drama of a film, consider
High Noon (1952), a movie made in the first days of
independent production in the early 1950s but with a
cast seasoned in the studios. Known for its elegance of
design, this suspenseful western told in real time won a
Best Actor OscarÒ for Gary Cooper as Marshal Will
Kane, and also offered opportunities for a range of character
actors to show their stuff. These included not only
Thomas Mitchell and other familiar faces such as Otto
Kruger (1885–1974), Lon Chaney Jr. (1906–1973), and
Harry Morgan (b. 1915), but young actors Lloyd Bridges
(1913–1998) and Lee Van Cleef (1925–1989), who had
been stuck in B movies; the Mexican-born actress Katy
Jurado (1924–2002), typed in ethnic parts; a theningenue,
Grace Kelly (1929–1982); and a young Jack
Elam (1918–2003), who would put in a memorable turn
years later in a High Noon pastiche, C’era una volta il
West (Once Upon a Time in the West, 1968). The compulsory
narrative economy that the film calls attention to
by its very structure requires each of the actors to establish
character briskly.
The ensemble of High Noon does what the casts of
all films do, except that the limited place and time
setting—a small frontier town between 10:32 and
12:00 on a Sunday morning in the early 1890s—throws
the ensemble as an ensemble into unusually vivid relief.
The way the characters, one by one, refuse the marshal’s
request for help turns the spotlight onto even the smallest
speaking part. By a slight swagger, Lloyd Bridges establishes
his character as brash, ambitious, and essentially
selfish—‘‘too young,’’ as Kane tells him. Jurado needs to
convey strength and intelligence, and she manages to do
so, while not entirely succeeding in throwing off the
‘‘hot-blooded Latina’’ stereotype the film imposes upon
her. In a scene in which she curtly and abruptly dismisses
Harvey (Bridges), her current lover, she has to turn
246 SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM