Bill Irwin

Bill Irwin trained as a clown, and he means that literally. He began as a vaudeville-style stage performer and was one of the people who dragged American circus back into serious artistic company in the 1970s, then carried the same discipline onto Broadway, where he won a Tony for Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and was nominated for Best Choreography in 1989 for Largely New York. Most performers with a screen career this long arrived through drama school. He arrived through pratfalls.

That training shows in how he occupies a frame. Irwin's body does the acting, and directors who understand this cast him for it. Lou Lou Who in How the Grinch Stole Christmas is essentially a silent-comedy performance wearing a Seuss costume. Cary Loudermilk in Legion is a scientist whose oddness is entirely physical, in the posture and the hands, before a line of dialogue explains anything. His earliest film credit here, Ham Gravy in Popeye, came from the same instinct.

The unglamorous truth is that most of his screen work is small: a scoutmaster, an uncle, a single dad, a brother, a neighbor. He is very good at them, and Rachel Getting Married is the one where a supporting part becomes the load-bearing wall of the film. Meanwhile several generations of children know him only as Mr. Noodle from Elmo's World on Sesame Street, silently failing to put on a sweater in front of a toddler audience that finds this hilarious. Both things draw on the same skill, and he has never treated one as beneath the other.