Chris Sarandon
Chris Sarandon is an actor, born 1942.
Christopher Sarandon was born in Beckley, West Virginia in 1942, and his first real mark on film was also his most decorated: Leon in Dog Day Afternoon (1975), which brought an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor. It is a short role in a long film and it changes the temperature of the whole thing.
His register is courtliness with something wrong underneath, and three parts in four years made a career of it. Jerry Dandrige in Fright Night (1985) plays the vampire next door as a relaxed, well-mannered neighbour who is entirely aware of how charming he is, and the film works because the charm is real rather than a mask he drops. Prince Humperdinck in The Princess Bride (1987) is a preening villain performed absolutely straight, no winking, which is exactly why the comedy around him lands. Detective Mike Norris in Child's Play (1988) has the least glamorous job in horror, being the man who eventually has to say the ridiculous thing out loud and be believed.
The part that outlived all of them was recorded in a booth. He provides the speaking voice of Jack Skellington in The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993), with the songs handled by another performer, and the warmth he brings to that reading is a large part of why the film became a permanent seasonal fixture. He has returned to his own franchises with an appetite that borders on good humour: a different role in the 2011 Fright Night remake, and Mike Norris again by way of archive footage in Curse of Chucky. Elsewhere: The Sentinel (1977), The Osterman Weekend (1983), Just Cause (1995), Bordello of Blood (1996) and The Resurrected (1991).
Movies (25)
- The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993)
- The Princess Bride (1987)
- Child's Play (1988)
- Safe (2012)
- Dog Day Afternoon (1975)
- Curse of Chucky (2013)
- Fright Night (1985)
- Fright Night (2011)
- Bordello of Blood (1996)
- Just Cause (1995)
- The Sentinel (1977)
- Perfume (2001)
- My Sassy Girl (2008)
- The Resurrected (1991)
- The Osterman Weekend (1983)
- Protocol (1984)
- Lipstick (1976)
- I Smile Back (2015)
- Edie & Pen (1996)
- Temptress (1995)
- Cuba (1979)
- AFI's 100 Years... 100 Passions: America's Greatest Love Stories (2002)
- Doc of Chucky (2024)
- Collision Course (1989)
- A Tale of Two Cities (1980)
TV (6)
Where to start with Chris Sarandon
Everything people enjoy about him later is already there in Dog Day Afternoon: softness, vanity, and a total refusal to play for sympathy. Sidney Lumet gives him one long scene on a telephone and he wins the film with it, which is why it belongs first.
Then Fright Night, which is his best leading-man work and one of the great friendly-monster performances, and The Princess Bride, where the joke only works because he never lets on that there is one.
The Nightmare Before Christmas is the immortal one and needs no introduction from me, though it is worth listening to how much characterisation he gets into a voice with no face attached. Child's Play is the professional job, holding a silly premise steady. Of the rest, The Sentinel is the strangest, The Osterman Weekend the most stylish, and Fright Night a wink for people who watched the original.