M Emmet Walsh, who has died aged 88, was one of the few character actors who could be pivotal, if not key, to almost every film he was in. His ability to define any role could tell the audience more about what they were seeing than all the leads put together. This was literally true of the role for which he became famous, as the private detective Loren Visser in the Coen brothers’ Blood Simple (1984), in which he not only is the true lead character, but also narrates the story.
Walsh used his oleaginous face and lugubrious body to reflect the twists of both character and plot; his narration reveals the natural, reptilian cynicism that lies beneath his compelling but superficial smiles. He is an ordinary man, but in a world that is, for the Coen brothers, ordinarily corrupt. He is the window into this film noir vision. As Visser explains: “Nothing comes with a guarantee. Now I don’t care if you’re the pope of Rome … something can always go wrong … What I know about is Texas, and down here, you’re on your own.”
Walsh had already played a number of memorable parts before Blood Simple; the Coens wanted him because they had been impressed with his corrupt parole officer tormenting Dustin Hoffman in Straight Time (1978). He had been the gullible sportswriter Dickie Dunn manipulated by Paul Newman in Slap Shot (1977), a crazed sniper in Steve Martin’s The Jerk (1979), and the grafting prisoner opposite warden Robert Redford in Brubaker (1980). Redford then cast Walsh in his directorial debut, the Oscar-winning Ordinary People (1980), as Timothy Hutton’s swimming coach, where his directness contrasts with all the other adults who define the film’s central dilemma of dysfunctional families. The film critic Roger Ebert paired Walsh with Harry Dean Stanton when he created a rule that no film featuring either could ever be totally bad.
Although his characters often spoke menacingly in southern drawls, Walsh was a northerner. He was born in Ogdensburg, New York, near the Canadian border, and grew up in nearby Swanton, Vermont, where his father, Harry, alongside his grandfather and uncle, was a customs agent on the border with Quebec; his mother, Agnes (nee Sullivan), was a homemaker. He earned a degree in business administration from Clarkson University, in Potsdam, New York, but enjoyed acting in university productions.
He decided to pursue a career on stage after his faculty adviser told him: “Why wait to be 40 to wonder whether you should have been an actor? Get rid of it now, or find out!” He studied at the American Academy of Dramatic Art in New York, supplementing his studies by sneaking into theatres during the intervals: “I saw Annie Bancroft do The Miracle Worker with Patty Duke maybe 40 times!,” he recalled. In 1975, he would play the doorman at Bancroft’s apartment house in The Prisoner of Second Avenue.
A mastoid operation when he was three had left Walsh deaf in one ear. “It was obvious I wasn’t going to do Shaw and Shakespeare and Molière, my speech was simply too bad,” he said. “People go and try to become the next Pacino, but they want something new, something different; they want you! So I had to figure out who I was and what I could do, that no one else could do.”
He did regional theatre in the north-east US before making his Broadway debut in 1969 in Does a Tiger Wear a Necktie?, alongside Al Pacino, who won a Tony award for his performance. That year he also made his film debut, uncredited, in Midnight Cowboy and, credited, as Arlo Guthrie’s overheated drill sergeant in Alice’s Restaurant.
He moved on to bigger, more noticeable parts; again with Pacino, as a corrupt cop in Serpico (1973) and in other major productions such as Nickelodeon (1976), Reds (1981) and Blade Runner (1982), in which he plays the cynical cop who brings Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) back to hunt cyborgs. That year he was filming Silkwood, with Meryl Streep, in Oklahoma when his agent called “with a script written by some kids for a low-budget movie”. Because they were working nearby in Austin, Texas, he took the job. Blood Simple was a hit, and Walsh won the first-ever Film Independent Spirit award as best male lead. “Suddenly my price went up and everybody wanted me.”
Although he was in the Coen’s next film, Raising Arizona, they moved on to John Goodman in what might be seen as Walsh roles. Walsh also moved on, including to some lighter roles. He was a proctologist in Chevy Chase’s Fletch (1985) and Rodney Dangerfield’s diving coach in Back to School (1986). He had a Ned Beatty-type part as a corrupt senator in the low-budget thriller Killer Image (1992) and finally got to play Shakespeare, as the apothecary in Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo and Juliet (1996), starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes.
Walsh also kept busy with television work, in dozens of series and TV movies. He provided voices for the Ken Burns documentaries The Civil War (1990) and Baseball (1994), and for animated series such as Big Guy and Rusty the Boy Robot, and Pound Puppies. He returned to the stage to play a memorable Grandpa Dodge in a production of Sam Shepard’s Buried Child at the National Theatre, London, in 2004.
Among the last of his 250 television roles were a recurring part in the third season of David Shore and Bryan Cranston’s Amazon series Sneaky Pete and the 2022 Showtime series American Gigolo.
In 2018 Walsh was inducted into the Character Actor Hall of Fame, receiving a lifetime achievement award. His analysis of his own work was simple: “I’m driving the movie forward … They don’t want an Emmet Walsh, they want a bus driver, they want a cop … I just try to sublimate myself and get in there and do it.”
His final role came in Mario Van Peebles’ western Outlaw Posse, which was released earlier this month.
• Michael Emmet Walsh, actor, born 22 March 1935; died 19 March 2024
