Edward Andrews

Edward Andrews had a face that did the casting director's job for him: stark white hair, imposing build, horn rimmed glasses, and a smile suggesting he had already read your file. For three decades and more he was among the most recognisable character actors in American film and television, almost always an authority figure of some sort, the ornery boss, the cagey businessman, the official delivering bad news warmly.

He was good enough to be used against the type, and often was. His George F. Babbitt in Elmer Gantry is a small masterpiece of provincial self satisfaction. Senator Orrin Knox in Advise & Consent puts him inside a genuinely hard film about the Senate. Rhett Tanner in The Phenix City Story took him somewhere closer to menace than anything else he did, and Tora! Tora! Tora! cast him as Admiral Harold Stark. Avanti! gave him J.J. Blodgett, the blustering American abroad.

Disney used him repeatedly in a lighter key, as the Defense Secretary in both The Absent-Minded Professor and Son of Flubber, and again in The Million Dollar Duck and Now You See Him, Now You Don't. Television took the rest: Studio One, Thriller, Love, American Style, The Doris Day Show, Supertrain. The two most recent films on his list are both from 1984, Gremlins and Sixteen Candles, and in each he plays exactly the sort of comfortable authority he had been playing since the 1950s. He died the following year.