Albert Dekker

Broadway first, and it stayed with him. Dekker worked in major stage productions including Death of a Salesman, An Enemy of the People, A Man for All Seasons and The Devils, and he was also, for a period, a politician, an unusual sideline for a working Hollywood actor. What the films bought from him was that stage-trained authority, which he then used almost exclusively to play men who could not be trusted with it.

His specialty was the respectable villain: the doctor, the executive, the man with the letterhead. He took the title role in Dr. Cyclops in 1940, a mad-scientist part that gave him one of his few leads, then Big Jim Colfax in The Killers, and Dr. Soberin in Kiss Me Deadly, where the performance is mostly voice. Soberin explains things in a calm, cultured, faintly amused tone, and that tone is more frightening than anything else in one of the coldest films noir ever made.

Around the villains he was a reliable studio character man across every genre the 1940s produced: John Minify in Gentleman's Agreement, parts across the war pictures and westerns in Beau Geste, Wake Island and In Old California, Louis XIII in The Man in the Iron Mask, the Comte de Provence in Marie Antoinette, Mr. Reynolds in The Furies, and, at the odd end of the scale, a Secretary of Defense in the American cut of a Japanese monster film.

The later credits are the prestige ones: Will Hamilton in East of Eden, Lawrence Hockstader in Suddenly, Last Summer, and finally Pat Harrigan, the railroad man, in The Wild Bunch. A perfect closing role for him, the respectable face of the money.