M Emmet Walsh was the outstanding Hollywood character actor who emerged in the American new wave, a performer whose mesmerically watchable and powerful looks made him eminently castable; he was jowly and heavy set, but always looked tough, as if the idea of a fistfight would not be a novel or frightening thing for him. But he also had a woundedly sad expression in those poached-egg eyes.
Walsh lent a texture of reality to any picture he was in – like his approximate contemporaries Ned Beatty or George Kennedy, a performer who could be part of the landscape and offset the importance of the male lead, often in some kind of antagonistic or malign authority role. He could be like a gargoyle or an everyman, but never a fool and always someone to be taken very seriously. In his later career, his habitual pairing with the male star found a piquant expression in his moment opposite the young Leonardo DiCaprio, playing the Apothecary in Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo+Juliet (1996).
