Clarence Williams III

Linc Hayes, the undercover cop in the dark glasses, ran on The Mod Squad from 1968 to 1973 and made Clarence Williams III a household face. He had come from the stage, where he earned a Tony nomination, and the discipline shows in everything after: he was an actor who trusted stillness in a business that rewards volume.

The parts that followed were rarely large and almost never soft. He plays the father in Purple Rain, and the domestic scenes he anchors are the reason that film has a bruise under its glitter. In 52 Pick-Up he is the blackmailer Bobby Shy. Deep Cover, Hoodlum and Sugar Hill put him to work at the crime end of the Black American century. And in Tales from the Hood he threw the restraint out entirely: Mr. Simms, the mortuary keeper who introduces each story, is all teeth and relish, and that performance is a large part of why the film still gets passed around.

Comedy used him well because he never signalled the joke. Samson Simpson in Half Baked and Merlin in Reindeer Games run off the same flat delivery as the villains do. The later credits kept the range visible: Jelly Roll Morton in The Legend of 1900, a colonel in The General's Daughter, Winston Hancock in Life, Maynard in The Butler, plus a turn in American Gangster. He worked steadily until his death in 2021, and almost none of it repeated anything he had already done.