Garry Goodrow

Garry Goodrow's reputation rests on two things that happened early. He originated Ernie in the 1959 stage production of The Connection, the Obie-winning play, playing a morose would-be jazz musician and heroin addict whose horn spends more time in the pawn shop than in his hands, and he repeated the role in the 1961 film version. He was also one of the founding members of The Committee, the San Francisco improvisational troupe.

That improv background produced his best-known film credit. Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, made at the height of the encounter-group boom, works precisely the vein of Californian self-improvement that The Committee's stage work lived in, and Goodrow is in it as Bert.

What follows is character work in the strictest sense, which is to say very small parts across three decades of American film. A doctor in the 1978 Invasion of the Body Snatchers. A role in Escape from Alcatraz. A hotel guest in Dirty Dancing. And a long run of credits reading Wino, Drunk Swinger, Nervous Man, Pick-Up Driver. There is no tidy career narrative to impose on that and it would be dishonest to invent one: he was a recognisable face who kept working, in an era when a face and a reliable few minutes were enough to keep working. His finest performance is in a film that almost nobody watches now.