William L. Petersen

Michael Mann hired William L. Petersen twice, and the distance between the two jobs is his early career in miniature. In Thief, in 1981, he is a bartender. Five years later, in Manhunter, he is Will Graham, the profiler who hunts a serial killer with Hannibal Lecter's grudging help, in a film that arrived long before The Silence of the Lambs made that world a phenomenon. In between came To Live and Die in L.A., where he plays a Secret Service agent whose recklessness the film pointedly declines to admire.

That is a specific screen quality: competence curdling into appetite. Petersen was cast as men whose professionalism covered something considerably less controlled, and he was consistently better at it than the films around him were.

Then he spent a long stretch doing the opposite. Gil Grissom on CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, which ran from 2000 to 2015, is deliberate, soft-spoken and emotionally withheld, a scientist who plainly prefers evidence to people, and the show's enormous success rested at least as much on Petersen's stillness as on its autopsy tables. He won a Screen Actors Guild Award with the ensemble, was nominated for a Golden Globe, and picked up three further Emmy nominations as a producer of the series. He returned to Grissom for CSI: Vegas, which premiered in October 2021.

Born in Evanston, Illinois in 1953, he worked in theatre before film, and the stage discipline shows in how little he does on camera.