Great Characters! New York Magazine’s List of Today’s Best Character Actors
Posted on March 25, 2021 at 10:38 am
I love character actors, and was delighted to see New York Magazine’s great list of today’s best, As the terrific documentaries “That Guy…Who Was in That Thing” and “That Gal…Who Was in That Thing” show, character actors have the tough job of being perfect every take, because the star’s best take is the one they will use, and handling a lot of expositional dialog so that the star can stick to the quips and quotable lines.
NYMag’s list is excellent, with some of my favorites, including Brian Tyree Henry, Beth Grant, Jason Mantzoukas, Rob Morgan, and Fred Melamed. Honestly, every one of the 32 on the list is a favorite of mine, someone whose name in the credits makes me smile in anticipation. Here’s to character actors!
While, of course, we love the main characters of our favorite films, often truly great characters and performances end up unnoticed, unremembered, or under appreciated simply because the characters were supporting, relegated to the background, or deemed less than perfect per society’s norms of the time.
With this concurrent Twitter challenge and blogathon, we hope to celebrate the bridesmaids instead of the brides, small parts with big heart, and the characters who are way too familiar with the background and the friend zone.
Follow along on Twitter or Instagram! #BridesmaidChallenge2019
For the What a Character! Blogathon: Thelma Ritter
Posted on December 15, 2017 at 6:00 am
I am honored to participate in this year’s “What a Character!” blogathon, featuring essays about great character actors by movie bloggers across the internet. And I am thrilled to have an opportunity to write about one of my very favorite character actors, the magnificent Thelma Ritter. Whether in comedy or drama, her honest earthiness gave her characters a blunt authenticity that was enormously appealing.
She was nominated six times for a Best Supporting Actress Oscar, still a record, three Golden Globes and an Emmy. And she won a Tony for “New Girl in Town.”
She was born in Brooklyn on Valentine’s Day in 1902, and never tried to lose her New York accent, which gave a lot of flavor to the characters she played. She did some acting and was an agent while her children were growing up, but did not get her first movie role until 1945’s “Miracle on 34th Street,” where she had a brief, unbilled scene as a tired mother who could not find a special toy for her son.
Her characters were usually blunt and smarter than the more educated and upper class characters around her. She brought warmth, humanity, street smarts, and crackerjack timing to all of her roles, opposite the biggest stars in Hollywood.
Ritter nursed James Stewart in “Rear Window.”
She was a tipsy maid in “Pillow Talk,” starring Doris Day and Rock Hudson. And she was Bette Davis’ assistant in “All About Eve,” memorably responding to Eve’s sad story with, “Everything but the bloodhounds snappin’ at her rear end.”
One of the most complex characters she played was a sometime police informant with her own code of honor in “Pickup on South Street.”
She also appeared in the very silly romantic comedy “A New Kind of Love,” with Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward and in “The Misfits” with Marilyn Monroe.
One of my favorite Ritter performances is in “The Mating Season,” where she a hamburger joint owner whose new daughter-in-law mistakes her for a maid.
And another is opposite Kirk Douglas and Mitzi Gaynor in “For Love of Money.” It’s a rare role for her because she plays a woman who is wealthy and powerful. Douglas plays a lawyer she hires to get her estranged daughters to marry the men she has picked for them.
Ritter is the very essence of the character actor, creating vitally real, relatable characters who made the world around the stars real and illuminating the story’s themes.
“I take the responsibility of playing another ethnicity very, very seriously,” he says, “and I promise myself and those people that I will represent them with as much dignity and integrity as I can muster. I’m not fooling around. I don’t want to make a fool of that cultural heritage. I represent them as I would represent my own.”
Do you wish there was a movie and television version of Shazam or Soundhound, those apps that identify songs? It’s here. Amazon has X-Ray for movies and television, an app that works on its Kindle Fire series and lets you ask about an actor while you are watching. Now if they only had an app to do that with people in real life….
I am honored to participate in this year’s “