Craig Wasson

Craig Wasson's first film credit, in 1977, was a character billed as Hippie Boy. Within a year he had two Vietnam pictures in release: Pvt. Dave Bisbee in The Boys in Company C and Cpl. Courcey in Go Tell the Spartans, both 1978, both films that treat the war as a bureaucratic disaster rather than an adventure. He was the right face for it. Wasson looks decent and slightly bewildered, which is a narrow but very useful thing to be.

Directors used that two ways. Arthur Penn cast him as Danilo Prozor in Four Friends in 1981 and the performance drew a Golden Globe nomination. Then Brian De Palma took the same open, faintly gullible quality and turned it into a weapon: Jake Scully in Body Double is an out-of-work actor with claustrophobia who watches a woman through a telescope and understands almost nothing about what he is looking at. It is the role Wasson is best remembered for, and it works precisely because he never plays Scully as clever.

Three years later he was Dr. Neil Gordon in A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, the hospital doctor who takes the teenagers seriously, which made him one of the very few sympathetic adults in that franchise. After that the parts got smaller: a TV host in Malcolm X, a supporting turn in Akeelah and the Bee, leads in low-budget science fiction such as Epoch and New Alcatraz. He kept working, which at that tier is its own kind of achievement.