Lyle Lovett
Lyle Lovett is an actor, born 1957.
The music came first and still comes first. Lovett, born in Klein, Texas in 1957 and recording since 1980, is a country singer-songwriter whose highest chart entry, Cowboy Man, reached number ten on the Billboard country chart, and he has won four Grammy Awards. The records sit at an angle to Nashville, with big-band horns and gospel voices where the format expects a fiddle, and the writing is dry to the point of deadpan.
The acting career is essentially one long professional friendship with Robert Altman. Lovett appears in The Player (1992) as Detective DeLongpre, in Short Cuts (1993) as Andy Bitkower, in Pret-a-Porter (1994) and in Cookie's Fortune (1999). Four films for one director is not an accident. Altman liked working with musicians, and Lovett gave him something specific: a stillness and an unreadable face that make an ordinary line sound faintly threatening. His detective in The Player is a comic performance built almost entirely out of not blinking.
Elsewhere he takes small parts that trade on the same quality, in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, The Opposite of Sex and Bastard Out of Carolina, and a role on the border thriller The Bridge. He appears regularly on Austin City Limits as himself, which is where the two halves of the CV meet.
He is a better actor than most musicians who act, mainly because he never tries to do more than the scene requires.
Movies (11)
TV (2)
Music (4)
Where to start with Lyle Lovett
Do the music first. Pontiac sits on this page as an album credit, an early record and still one of his sharpest, spare and funny and mean in places, and it explains the screen presence better than any of the films do.
For the acting, The Player is the entry point. His detective is a small part played with such flat patience that it becomes the funniest thread in a very funny film. Then Short Cuts, where he is one strand in a large weave and the least comfortable person in it, and Cookie's Fortune, the warmest of the four Altman pictures and the easiest to love.
Prêt-à-Porter is the weakest of that run. The Opposite of Sex and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas are the good small sightings, and Austin City Limits is simply him doing the day job.