Albert Brooks

Albert Brooks was born Albert Lawrence Einstein in Beverly Hills, which is the kind of biographical detail a comedian normally has to invent. He built a stand-up act out of taking stand-up apart, then moved into films he wrote, directed and starred in, beginning with Real Life in 1979, a fake documentary about a film crew steadily ruining the family it is filming.

The Brooks protagonist is the same man in every one of them: articulate, self-justifying, and convinced that his anxiety is a form of intelligence. Defending Your Life puts him in an afterlife courtroom having to account for a lifetime of small cowardices. Mother moves him back in with his mother to work out why his marriages keep failing. Modern Romance and Lost in America, the two titles his admirers quote most, are not among the credits listed here.

For other directors he tends to be used as a solvent for sentiment. Broadcast News, which brought an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actor, casts him as the smartest man in the newsroom and the one least able to sit in front of a camera. Twenty-four years later Drive used him against every expectation the audience had accumulated, as a soft-spoken producer turned mobster whose menace arrives with no warning at all.

Running alongside all of it is the voice work, which is what most children know him for. Marlin in Finding Nemo and Finding Dory is the Brooks character redrawn for a family audience, worry and all, and it is the most widely heard performance of his life.