Roberts Blossom

A poet first. Blossom wrote verse and worked in the theatre, and American film eventually hired him for the one thing a casting department cannot manufacture: a face and a voice that sound like they walked in from outside the industry. He was past forty-five before screen work started arriving in quantity, and he never once played anyone's idea of a leading man.

1974 contains the whole range in a single year. He was Mr. Gatz, Gatsby's father, in The Great Gatsby, a small wounded man arriving to bury a son whose life turned out to be an invention. He was also Ezra Cobb, the lead of the horror film Deranged, and he plays him not as a monster but as a lonely man being perfectly reasonable, which is far worse. Very few actors working then could have done both, and fewer would have been asked.

Everything after that is the character actor directors call when a scene needs instant history: the farmer in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Doc in Escape from Alcatraz, George LeBay in Christine, who does the work of an entire prologue in almost no time, the Aged Master in The Last Temptation of Christ, Wild Bob Cody in Slaughterhouse-Five, Papa Thermodyne in Citizens Band. Then, in 1990, Old Man Marley in Home Alone, a part written as a neighbourhood bogeyman that he quietly turns into the only adult in the film paying proper attention. He worked into the mid-1990s and died in 2011.