M.
Emmet Walsh, who has died aged 88, was a steadfast character actor adored among
cinephiles for the notes of scuffed-up life he gifted American film over his six-decade
career, most memorably in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982) and the
Coen brothers’ Blood Simple (1984).Heavyset
and amenable to dishevelment, with flyaway hair, a squint and a quavering
voice, he could perhaps have only broken through amid the New Hollywood of the
1970s, geared as the movement was to unvarnished explorations of the human
condition. Dubbing Walsh “the poet of sleaze”, Roger Ebert linked the actor
with Harry Dean Stanton – a forlorn beanpole to Walsh’s burly scrapper – in
what he called “the Stanton-Walsh rule”, decreeing “no movie featuring either
Harry Dean Stanton or M. Emmet Walsh in a supporting role can be entirely bad”.
Walsh
was nearing middle age when he broke through, initially playing blue-collar types.
Yet extended scrutiny revealed a glint in his eye that invited interpretation
as either mischievous, murderous or both simultaneously. He was the oddball
sportswriter Dickie Dunn in Paul Newman hockey comedy Slap Shot (1977);
Dustin Hoffman’s scuzzball parole officer in Straight Time (1978), a
character described by critic Mike Clark as “a cesspool in a flowered shirt”;
and the sniper pursuing Steve Martin with such taunts as “Die, milkface!” in The Jerk (1979).
In
Blade Runner (1982), he was Bryant, the LAPD chief who pulls Harrison
Ford’s replicant hunter Rick Deckard out of retirement, although the film’s
grander designs left the actor bemused. Required to smoke through multiple
takes, non-smoker Walsh began feeling nauseous, eventually telling director
Scott “you ought to be hung by your balls off the ceiling and twisted from left
to right”. Producer Alan Ladd Jr. overheard, and promptly dropped Walsh from
another movie he was preparing.
A
more rewarding experience followed with Blood Simple (1984), the low-budget
neo-noir that announced the Coens as emergent prodigies. As private eye Visser,
poking through the weeds of a marital murder plot, Walsh demonstrated a layered
seediness; the force of the film’s blackly potent punchline was largely down to
the chuckle in his gurgling voice. As Pauline Kael observed: “Walsh lays on the
loathsomeness, but he gives it a little twirl – a sportiness.”
It
landed Walsh the Best Male Lead gong at 1986’s Independent Spirit Awards, but
he continued to regard himself as chiefly a team player: “My job is to come in
and move the story along. I’m a character man. The stars don’t do the
exposition… so I come on with a Redford or Newman or Dustin [Hoffman] or
somebody, and I throw the ball to them, and they throw it back.”
Michael
Emmet Walsh was born on March 22, 1935 in Ogdensburg, New York, the son of
customs agent Henry Walsh and his wife Agnes (née Sullivan). The family
relocated to Vermont shortly thereafter, where the three-year-old Walsh lost
the hearing in his left ear following a botched mastoid operation. He attended
Tilton School in New Hampshire and studied marketing at New York’s Clarkson
University, where he also appeared in stage productions.
A
faculty advisor urged Walsh to apply for the American Academy of Dramatic Arts,
where his assigned roommate was William Devane. Upon graduating, he spent a
decade working in regional theatre, making his TV debut on NBC soap The
Doctors in 1968, and taking his Broadway bow alongside Al Pacino in the
1969 premiere of Don Petersen’s Does a Tiger Wear a Necktie?
He
felt his prospects in theatre were limited, due to his thick Vermont accent (“I
wasn’t going to do Shaw and Shakespeare and Molière – my speech was simply too
bad”), although he made a belated, one-off comeback in the National Theatre’s
2004 revival of Sam Shepard’s Buried Child. Variety noted “the
veteran of 101 movies and counting turns out to be a no less astonishing theatre
animal”.
Mostly,
he dug in at the movies, reuniting with the Coens for Raising Arizona
(1987), where he played Nicolas Cage’s loudmouth co-worker, billed in the
credits as “Machine Shop Ear-Bender”. He took a rare upstanding role as Michael
Keaton’s sponsor in alcoholism drama Clean and Sober (1988), then found
himself fighting back-to-back with Dolph Lundgren in Red Scorpion
(1988). It was the Walsh career in a nutshell: you never knew where he would
turn up, nor what he’d be doing there.
In
the 1990s, he was a millionaire’s goon in indie fable The Music of Chance
(1993), Tim Allen’s father-in-law in Home Improvement (1994), the
Apothecary in Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet (1996), and a fleeting but
significant presence in The X-Files (1999), advising conspiracy nut Fox
Mulder to “start paying a little less attention to the heart of the mystery and
a little more attention to the mystery of the heart”. There was also an
appearance in summer dud Wild Wild West (1999), which even Ebert admitted
contravened the Stanton-Walsh rule.
More
recently, he was seen – greyer and shaggier of brow – on TV in Sneaky Pete
(2019) and The Righteous Gemstones (2019-22) and on the big screen as the
security guard Mr. Proofroc in Knives Out (2019). His final appearance was
in Mario van Peebles’ Western sequel Outlaw Posse (2024).
He
lived alone in rural Vermont, insisting “I’m content without having to get on
the Johnny Carson show every other night [to] say how wonderful I am. I’m a
low-profile guy.” It was, finally, the characters who got him out of bed: “I
approach each job thinking it might be my last, so it better be the best work
possible. I want to be remembered as a working actor. I’m being paid for what
I’d do for nothing.”
M.
Emmet Walsh, born March 22, 1935, died March 19, 2024.
