G.D. Spradlin

Some actors get hired for warmth. Spradlin got hired for the opposite. He had a dry Oklahoma voice and a face that suggested a man reading your file, and directors used him for four decades as the senator, the general, the lawyer, the church elder, the authority figure who is already lying when the scene starts. He was credited in more than seventy film and television productions and he was also a practising attorney and a businessman, which may explain why the bureaucratic menace never looks like acting.

The defining part is Senator Pat Geary in The Godfather Part II, a man who insults the Corleones to their faces while taking their money, and who finds out what that costs. The same performance resurfaces in the 1977 television re-edit of the saga. Apocalypse Now gave him General Corman, sitting at the other end of the lunch table that hands Willard his orders. Between those two films sits about as much authority as any character actor has ever been asked to embody.

His screen credits here begin in the mid-1960s, on Pistols 'n' Petticoats and Cimarron Strip and in the Charlton Heston western Will Penny, so the acting career started well into adult life and never slowed. The later work leans comic without ever winking: the circling attorney in The War of the Roses, a Baptist money man in Ed Wood, Ben Bradlee played for laughs in the Watergate comedy Dick, a hawkish executive in Canadian Bacon, a president in The Long Kiss Goodnight. He died in 2011.