Don Rickles

Don Rickles worked out early that he was never going to succeed by being likeable. Born in Queens in 1926, he built an act out of assault. He walked into a room, identified everybody's ethnicity, weight and hairline, and did ninety minutes on it. The affection underneath was real and the audience knew it, which is the only reason the whole thing was survivable. He became a fixture of Las Vegas, of the Dean Martin roasts, and of late-night television, where Johnny Carson and later David Letterman used him as a controlled explosion.

The screen career ran alongside and never quite matched it. He was a submariner in Run Silent, Run Deep in 1958, a scheming sergeant in Kelly's Heroes in 1970, and fronted two short-lived series of his own, both titled The Don Rickles Show, before a two-season run on C.P.O. Sharkey from 1976. He won a Primetime Emmy for an individual variety performance. Martin Scorsese then gave him the best straight role of his life in Casino, as a casino manager who says almost nothing and knows absolutely everything, played with an unnerving calm funnier than any of his written material.

Then Pixar hired him. Mr. Potato Head in Toy Story is a small, sour, spectacularly ungrateful piece of plastic, and Rickles gave that franchise its only genuinely cruel voice, which four films needed more than they ever admitted. He worked almost to the end and died in 2017.