Alan Dale
Alan Dale is an actor, born 1947.
Alan Dale was born in Dunedin in 1947, played rugby as a young man, worked a string of unrelated jobs after retiring from the sport, and only decided to become a professional actor at twenty-seven. With little work available in New Zealand he moved to Australia, played Dr. John Forrest on The Young Doctors from 1979 to 1982, and then became Jim Robinson on Neighbours, a role he held from 1985 until 1993 and the one he is still best known for in Australia and Britain. He left after falling out with the producers over what the cast was being paid, and was then so thoroughly typecast that he struggled to find work at all.
Relocating to the United States in 2000 rebuilt the career, and it rebuilt it around a single, extremely marketable quality: he is completely believable as the man who owns the building. Caleb Nichol on The O.C. is the best version, a rapacious patriarch who is also genuinely funny. Bradford Meade on Ugly Betty softens the type into something sadder. Charles Widmore arrives late in Lost and immediately reorganises the show's entire power structure without ever raising his voice.
Films use him for exactly the same currency, generally in a few scenes: Praetor Hiren in Star Trek Nemesis, General Bob Ross in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Councilman Rockwell in Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Monsignor Chamberlain in Priest. He is also very funny as the Australian Ambassador in Flight of the Conchords.
Movies (14)
- Priest (2011)
- Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008)
- Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014)
- Tangled Ever After (2012)
- Entourage (2015)
- Star Trek: Nemesis (2002)
- After the Sunset (2004)
- Tangled: Before Ever After (2017)
- Hollywood Homicide (2003)
- Don't Be Afraid of the Dark (2010)
- Grace (2014)
- A Little Bit of Heaven (2011)
- Doomsday Prophecy (2011)
- First Daughter (1999)
TV (16)
Where to start with Alan Dale
Nothing else here beats Lost. Charles Widmore turns up long after the board is set and rearranges it anyway, and Dale plays him as a man who has never in his life needed to shout.
The O.C. is the fuller version of the same idea and probably his most enjoyable performance: Caleb Nichol is a patriarch villain written with actual wit. Ugly Betty takes the archetype and finds the loneliness in it.
Australian and British viewers may want Neighbours instead, where Jim Robinson was the family patriarch for eight years and remains the role he cannot escape at home. In film he is nearly always the voice of institutional authority: Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and Star Trek: Nemesis all use him that way, and Flight of the Conchords gets a very good joke out of it.
The American television years
He arrived in American television in his fifties and immediately became the standard casting for the wealthy, cold patriarch. Charles Widmore in Lost is the best written of them, and The O.C. is where the type got fixed.
The Australian and New Zealand work
Jim Robinson in Neighbours ran eight years and made him a household name across two countries. Flight of the Conchords is the outlier, and one of the very few times anyone has cast him for comedy.
The films
A long run of small authority parts in very large films: a Starfleet admiral, a World Security Council member, a general. It is a specific job and he does it well enough that the studios keep calling.