Mike Mazurki

Six foot five, a face like weathered stone, a croak for a voice, and a legal education he barely used. Mazurki was born in what is now Ukraine, wrestled professionally, and moved into films as exactly what he looked like: thugs, henchmen, brainless athletes, gangsters. He appeared in more than a hundred of them.

He was better than the typecasting, and one performance proves it. Moose Malloy in Murder, My Sweet is a huge, slow, dangerous man looking for a woman who stopped thinking about him years ago, and Mazurki plays him with a bewildered gentleness that makes the menace worse rather than softer. Film noir kept hiring him and used him well: The Strangler in Night and the City, where the film puts his actual trade on screen, Bruno in Nightmare Alley, Dan in I Walk Alone, Sidney Winant in Dark City.

The second half of the career is comedy, mostly at his own expense and mostly good-natured about it. He is one of Spats' henchmen in Some Like It Hot, a miner in It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, the drunk in a Hong Kong dive bar in Around the World in 80 Days, Big Mike in Pocketful of Miracles. He kept working in Westerns to the end, Donovan's Reef, Cheyenne Autumn and 7 Women among them, and turned up on television from Gilligan's Island to Land of the Giants. He founded the Cauliflower Alley Club, an association for people who had come out of the ring, which suggests he never really stopped being a wrestler who happened to act.