Jeffrey Jones

Jeffrey Jones was born in Buffalo in 1946 and trained seriously for the work: the Putney School, then the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, then Lawrence University. He built a stage career first, in productions of The Crucible, The Importance of Being Earnest and The Glass Menagerie, and picked up two Tony nominations along the way. Film used him in small parts through the 1970s until Amadeus in 1984 gave him Emperor Joseph II and a face the camera could not stop returning to.

The skill is reaction. Jones gets his laugh from what happens to his face after the other actor stops talking, and almost none of it from the lines he is given. He specialises in pompous men whose dignity collapses in real time, and he plays every indignity absolutely straight, which is why the collapse is funny. Ed Rooney in Ferris Bueller's Day Off is the purest case: a school administrator the film spends ninety minutes destroying, performed by an actor who never once signals that he knows it is a comedy. Charles Deetz in Beetlejuice runs the same engine at a lower rev, an oblivious yuppie irritated at ghosts for interrupting his weekend.

He is not only a comic actor, and the eighties and nineties kept proving it. He is briskly competent as the submarine expert in The Hunt for Red October, weaselly and frightened as the lawyer Eddie Barzoon in The Devil's Advocate, oily in Sleepy Hollow, ghoulish in Ravenous, and genuinely touching as Criswell in Ed Wood, a fraud among fellow frauds. The best late role came on television: A. W. Merrick, the newspaperman on Deadwood from 2004 to 2006, a decent man who believes in the printed word in a camp that does not. He returned to Merrick for Deadwood: The Movie in 2019. The filmography thins out sharply after the mid-2000s.