Dick Miller

Dick Miller made more than a hundred and eighty films and was rarely on screen for longer than a scene in any of them. Born in the Bronx in 1928, he started with Roger Corman in the fifties and stayed in that orbit for sixty years, following the young directors who came out of it: Joe Dante, who cast him in every single film he made, plus James Cameron, Martin Scorsese and a long tail of people who grew up watching him.

The thing he perfected is the beleaguered everyman. Not comic relief exactly, more the New Yorker who has seen worse and is annoyed rather than frightened. He is Murray Futterman in Gremlins, the neighbour complaining about foreign machinery shortly before foreign machinery ruins his evening. He is the pawnshop clerk in The Terminator, reading a list of weapons back to a customer he can tell is trouble, playing the whole exchange as a man losing an argument about store policy. He is Walter Paisley in The Howling, a name he first used as the lead of a Corman picture called A Bucket of Blood and then carried as a running joke through Twilight Zone: The Movie and others.

His Saturn Award nomination came for Explorers in 1985, which is roughly as much official recognition as a career like this collects. He kept working into his eighties, in The Hole and Burying the Ex among others, and died in 2019.