David Morse

David Morse spent six years as Dr. Jack "Boomer" Morrison on St. Elsewhere, from 1982 to 1988, which is long enough for most actors to become a face the audience trusts and nothing else. He left that behind almost completely. The film career that followed was built out of men who carry authority the way other people carry a limp: it is simply there, and it costs them something.

What he does better than nearly anyone is decency under pressure without a hint of softness. Brutus Howell in The Green Mile is the whole method in one part, a prison guard doing an appalling job kindly, never once asking the audience to admire him for it. The flip side is Detective Michael Tritter on House, a man who is technically in the right and utterly intolerable about it, a role that earned Morse an Emmy nomination. He took a second nomination for playing George Washington in the HBO miniseries John Adams, where he had to be a monument and a man in the same scene.

He has also worked steadily in the theatre, winning a Drama Desk and an Obie for Uncle Peck in the Off-Broadway production of How I Learned to Drive, and going on to Broadway in The Seafarer. Television kept giving him the roles film would not: Terry Colson, the honest cop in a rotten New Orleans department, across three seasons of Treme, then Outsiders, Escape at Dannemora and The Chair. He remains one of the most reliable supporting actors in American film, which is a compliment and, given what he can do with a lead, a slight shame.