Cheech Marin

Cheech Marin was born in Los Angeles in 1946 and built the first half of his career with Tommy Chong. As Cheech and Chong they were the defining stoner comedy act of the seventies and early eighties, and the films they made, Up in Smoke and the four that followed, are shaggy, cheap and almost plotless by design. What holds them together is that Marin's comic instrument is warmth rather than aggression: he plays enthusiasm, not sarcasm, which is why the act never turned cruel.

That warmth is why the second act worked. He directed and starred in Born in East L.A. in 1987, a comedy about an American citizen deported to Mexico, which is a considerably sharper idea than the counterculture films it followed. Then came six seasons on Nash Bridges as Don Johnson's partner, an ordinary network cop show that gave him a straight-man register he had never used on film.

Two long collaborations define the rest. Robert Rodriguez has cast him repeatedly, most enjoyably in From Dusk Till Dawn, where he plays several completely different parts in the same picture, and across Desperado, the Spy Kids films, Planet Terror and Machete. Disney and Pixar built the other career: Banzai in The Lion King, Ramone the low-rider across the Cars films, and a part in Coco. It is a strange, durable filmography, and the through line is that he is very hard to dislike on screen, in any decade, in any register.