James Cromwell

Cromwell was raised in a film family, adopted by the actress Kay Johnson and the director John Cromwell, who was blacklisted during the McCarthy era. He studied engineering at Carnegie Tech, went into theatre anyway, and spent the seventies and eighties as a comic utility player, turning up in Murder by Death, The Man with Two Brains and Revenge of the Nerds. He was fifty five when Babe made him famous, playing a farmer who barely speaks and who gets one of the great closing scenes in family cinema.

The instrument he found afterwards is authority, and the interesting part is that he can point it in either direction. Dudley Smith in L.A. Confidential is the template for one version: an avuncular, courteous senior policeman who is the worst man in the film, played without a single raised voice. Warden Moores in The Green Mile, Dr Lanning in I, Robot and Zefram Cochrane in Star Trek: First Contact are variations on men whose institutional weight is the whole point.

He has kept working at a rate most character actors would find exhausting, adding a Primetime Emmy for American Horror Story and late supporting turns in The Artist, Succession and Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom. He has also been an outspoken political activist for decades and a vegetarian since 1974, after a visit to a Texas stockyard.