Rick Overton

Rick Overton grew up in a musical household, which is not the usual origin story for a comic actor. His father, Hal Overton, arranged for Thelonious Monk's big band and taught at Juilliard; his mother sang with The Chordettes. He began stand-up in high school as half of a double act, went solo at the New York Improvisation in the early 1970s, and the timing he learned there is the entire basis of the screen career.

He is a writer as well, and the Emmy on the shelf is for that side of it: the writing staff of Dennis Miller Live, across its run from 1994 to 2002. As a performer he has done one very particular job for forty years, which is to say the small wrong thing that makes a scene funnier without stealing it. Ralph in Groundhog Day, one of the two bowling-alley drinkers, is the perfect example: he is handed the answer to the film's central question and throws it away completely.

The rest is a tour of American screen comedy since the early eighties. He is the warehouse supervisor in Beverly Hills Cop, the brownie Franjean in Willow, the maitre d' in Mrs. Doubtfire, a panicking bystander in Cloverfield, with Eight Legged Freaks, The Rocketeer, Dinner for Schmucks and EDtv in between. Northfork, in 2003, is the one that asked him to be sad instead.