Larry Hankin

Larry Hankin has one of the most recognisable faces in American film and one of the least recognised names. Born in New York in 1937, he has been playing men at the edge of the frame for more than four decades: tall, hangdog, permanently unimpressed, he is what a director casts when a scene needs one weary person in it who looks like they have been standing there for years.

The three substantial parts are early and spread out: Charley Butts in Escape from Alcatraz in 1979, Ace in Running Scared in 1986, and Carl Alphonse in Billy Madison in 1995. Everything else is smaller and, oddly, more quoted. He is Doobie in Planes, Trains and Automobiles, the officer in Home Alone, the landlord in Pretty Woman, and Mr. Heckles on Friends, a neighbour with about four scenes who somehow became one of the sitcom's most repeated bits.

The late run is the best of it. Old Joe, the salvage-yard owner in Breaking Bad and again in El Camino, distils the whole career: a man with exactly one professional opinion, delivered slowly, who solves a problem nobody else in the scene can. It is a body of work built almost entirely out of one-scene men, and it adds up to a face everybody knows and nobody can name.