Elisha Cook Jr.

Nobody in American film played out of his depth better. Cook spent his early career on cheerful, brainy collegiates until The Maltese Falcon cast him against type in 1941 as Wilmer Cook, the baby-faced gunman who tries to intimidate Humphrey Bogart's Sam Spade and gets laughed at for it. That performance set the next fifty years.

The specific thing he does is hard to fake: he plays small men who have decided to be dangerous, and he lets you see the decision wobbling. The gun is always slightly too big for the hand. In The Killing he is George Peatty, the racetrack cashier whose marriage is the weak joint in an otherwise perfect robbery, and the whole film's tension runs through a man who cannot keep his face still. In The Big Sleep he is Harry Jones, a small-timer who holds his nerve for longer than anyone expects. In Shane he is the homesteader goaded into the mud outside a saloon, and the scene is the moment that western stops being pastoral.

His working life spanned more than sixty years, with the first credit here in 1940 and the last in the 1980s. He moved comfortably between genres: horror in House on Haunted Hill and Rosemary's Baby, westerns from The Indian Fighter through Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid, and a long television afterlife that included Ice Pick on Magnum, P.I., Weasel in Salem's Lot and Uncle Albert on ALF. He died in 1995, having been the face of small-time desperation for longer than most leading men managed careers.