Richard Liberty
Richard Liberty worked out of Florida, and the credits gathered here are a fair record of what that meant for an actor in the 1970s and 80s: whatever came to town. A George Romero picture, a time-travel film set aboard a warship, a teen comedy sequel, a Miami-shot action romp, a newspaper thriller, and television while the state still had a television industry.
He worked for Romero twice, twelve years apart. He is Artie in The Crazies (1973), and then Dr. Matthew Logan in Day of the Dead (1985), billed with the nickname Frankenstein, in a part Romero wrote for him specifically. Liberty plays the doctor with a distracted, faintly delighted calm that is far more disturbing than shouting would have been, and it is the performance he is remembered for. It deserves to be.
Outside horror he was a reliable authority figure: Mr. Howard in Flight of the Navigator (1986), a commissioner in Porky's II: The Next Day (1983), a chaplain in Just Cause (1995), an officer in The Final Countdown (1980), a small part in The Mean Season (1985). He also appeared on Miami Vice and Key West, neither of which is among the credits listed here, and on Moon Over Miami in 1993. He died on 2 October 2000 in Dania Beach, Florida, at the age of 68.
Movies (9)
TV (1)
Where to start with Richard Liberty
Day of the Dead first, and not only because it is the famous one. Liberty gets the best-written part in the film and plays the tension between scientific curiosity and ordinary human decency without ever signalling which side he has landed on, which happens to be the whole argument the film is having. Watch him closely in the scenes where nothing violent is going on.
Then go back to The Crazies, made twelve years earlier by the same director, where the budget is smaller and the panic sits much closer to the ground. Flight of the Navigator is the family-friendly outlier and a neat demonstration of how much authority he could carry in a handful of scenes. The Final Countdown and The Mean Season round out the Florida years, and Just Cause is the late one.