Ernie Hudson

Years of early-eighties genre filler came first: The Octagon, Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone, Two of a Kind. Then Ghostbusters arrived in 1984 and made Ernie Hudson, a Michigan kid out of Benton Harbor born in 1945, permanently famous for the part with a fraction of the lines the other three got.

Winston Zeddemore is the only one of the four who is not a scientist and the only one who takes the job because it is a job. Hudson plays him as the sane man in a haunted city, reacting to the supernatural roughly the way a viewer would, and that ordinariness is why the character survived four films across forty years. It is also the through-line of everything else he does. He is the one plausible adult in the room: the decent cop in The Crow, the pragmatic mercenary captain in Congo, the FBI handler putting up with Sandra Bullock in Miss Congeniality.

The filmography is a working actor's, which means Leviathan and The Basketball Diaries and The Hand That Rocks the Cradle sit next to Mr. Magoo, Dragonball Evolution and two Beverly Hills Chihuahua sequels. He is never the reason those are bad. The best-written role of his career came on television: Warden Leo Glynn on Oz from 1997 to 2003, a man running an institution he cannot control, which gave Hudson the moral weight the movies mostly used as set dressing.

He has kept working at a rate most actors half his age do not manage, with Grace and Frankie, L.A.'s Finest, City on a Hill and a run on Quantum Leap from 2022 to 2024. Winston finally got his due in the revival films, where Afterlife and Frozen Empire treat him as the franchise elder rather than the fourth name on the poster.