Scatman Crothers

Benjamin Sherman Crothers was a musician as well as an actor, and the credit list keeps proving it. He is on The Colgate Comedy Hour in 1950, he is credited simply as Singer on the 1972 television Lorax, and he has voice credits released in 1986, the year he died. The screen career built slowly underneath that, through porters and bit parts, several of them uncredited, before it found its decade.

The 1970s are where the range sits. Very few actors were moving as freely as he did between New Hollywood and the blaxploitation cycle in the same years: Lewis in The King of Marvin Gardens and Orderly Turkle in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest on one side, Duke in Truck Turner, Pop Byrd in Black Belt Jones and a reverend in Friday Foster on the other. Turkle is the performance to argue for. He plays a night orderly who is kind, weak and a little drunk, and he plays all three at once without ever asking to be forgiven for the second and third.

Then Kubrick cast him as Hallorann in The Shining and made him famous to people who had never seen Chico and the Man, where he played Louie the Garbage Man. He won a Saturn Award for Best Supporting Actor. The other half of the job was voice, and it may be the more durable half: Scat Cat in The Aristocats, the title role in Hong Kong Phooey, Meadowlark Lemon in the Globetrotters cartoons, and Jazz in The Transformers and its 1986 feature.