Fred Willard

Fred Willard, born in Shaker Heights, Ohio in 1933, worked for a long time before the work he is remembered for. He is in Silver Streak in 1976 and in Roxanne in 1987, playing mayors and functionaries, a reliable comic supporting man in an era that had a lot of them.

What made him irreplaceable was a very particular gift: he played men who did not know they were losing the room. Buck Laughlin in Best in Show, the dog-show commentator who knows nothing about dogs and will not let that slow him down, is the definitive Willard performance, and given how those films are assembled, from outlines rather than scripts, a great deal of it is his own invention. He worked in that company from This Is Spinal Tap in 1984 through Waiting for Guffman, A Mighty Wind, For Your Consideration and Mascots, and he never once played the joke as if he were in on it.

The day job was sitcoms and voice work, and he was excellent at both: Emmy nominations for Everybody Loves Raymond and Modern Family, where Frank Dunphy is his warmest creation, a father delighted by absolutely everything. He is Ed Harken, the news director trying to run a building of idiots, in both Anchorman films, and the live-action chief executive in WALL-E. There is also a stretch of parody films that took his goodwill and returned nothing. He kept working until he died in 2020, including a lovely late run on Space Force.