The tall, placid, dreamy-eyed actor Tony Todd, who has died aged 69, brought an incongruous yet haunting tenderness to his frequent appearances in the horror genre. His signature role was the undead, hook-handed, bee-stung title character in Candyman (1992), who materialises whenever someone is foolhardy enough to say his name five times while looking in the mirror. Though Todd is unseen for the first 45 minutes, his voice is heard in the movie’s opening seconds. “With my hook for a hand, I’ll split you from your groin to your gullet,” he promises.
But this was no straightforward ghoul. The Candyman was once Daniel Robitaille, a 19th-century portrait painter whose romance with a white woman drove her father, a racist landowner, to hire local townsfolk to kill him. One of his hands was hacked off; he was then drenched in honey and left to the mercy of bees, which stung him to death. Todd invested the character with elegance, nobility and sensitivity. Monstrous he may have become, but the audience was never permitted to forget the man he once was.
