David Clennon

Clennon built a career in 1970s American film out of very small, very exact parts: The Paper Chase, Go Tell the Spartans, Coming Home, and Being There, where he is one of the lawyers who cannot work out who the gardener is. Hal Ashby kept hiring him, and so did Costa-Gavras, who used him three times, in Missing, Hanna K. and Betrayed, usually as an official with a comfortable explanation for something indefensible.

Then there is Palmer. John Carpenter's The Thing gave him the stoned helicopter mechanic at the back of every scene, and the performance has aged into something better than a supporting turn: Palmer is the one who says the ridiculous thing that is also correct, and Clennon plays the paranoia as a slow leak rather than an explosion.

Television gave him his defining recurring role, Miles Drentell, the advertising chief in thirtysomething and later Once and Again, a man who never raises his voice because he has never needed to. He won a Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Comedy Series along the way, and he has kept going in exactly the same vein for decades: Star 80, Light Sleeper, Matinee, Syriana, and Amy's father in Gone Girl, where the smoothness he has been deploying since the 1970s finally gets used on a press conference.