Lee Van Cleef

He refused to have his nose fixed. Asked to alter it so he could play sympathetic parts, Van Cleef said no, and the consequence was immediate: his 1952 debut in High Noon put him on screen as Jack Colby, an outlaw with no dialogue at all. That face then paid for a decade of minor villainy, in Kansas City Confidential, The Big Combo, Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, The Tin Star, Ride Lonesome and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, mostly billed below people who got to talk.

By the mid-1960s the career was fading and a serious car crash had knocked the interest out of him. Then Sergio Leone cast him as Colonel Douglas Mortimer in For a Few Dollars More (1965), and a year later as Angel Eyes in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Two starring roles in the Dollars films made him a box-office draw in Europe.

What he was actually good at is stillness. Mortimer and Angel Eyes are both men doing arithmetic while everyone else shouts, and Van Cleef plays them with nearly the same face. One is decent and one is not, and the entire difference lives in what he permits his eyes to do. Few Western stars of that era did so little on camera to such effect.

Italy kept him working through the 1970s: Sabata and its sequel, Day of Anger, Death Rides a Horse, The Grand Duel, Barquero, plus an American slot as Chris Adams in The Magnificent Seven Ride!. Heart disease from the late 1970s and a pacemaker in the early 1980s slowed nothing down. He was still taking parts, including Bob Hauk in Escape from New York, until he died in December 1989. A Golden Boot Award came in 1983; his grave marker reads BEST OF THE BAD.