Robert Davi

Robert Davi grew up in Astoria, Queens, trained as a singer, and has since appeared in more than 130 films. The voice is the giveaway: a low, deliberate rasp that sounds like it is doing you a favour by staying calm. Casting directors heard a heavy and stopped looking, which was both his career and his ceiling.

He is best when the character is smarter than everyone in the room and knows it. Franz Sanchez in Licence to Kill is the peak, a drug lord who runs his empire on personal loyalty and treats betrayal as a manners problem, and Davi plays him with a courtesy that is far more alarming than shouting. Special Agent Johnson in Die Hard is the opposite and just as good: a federal officer whose total confidence is the actual joke. As Jake in The Goonies he is the opera-singing member of a family of criminals, a gag that only works because the singing is real.

The eighties and nineties gave him a lane and he worked it hard. Max Keller in Raw Deal, Tony Moretti in Action Jackson, Phil Heinemann in Predator 2, a detective in Maniac Cop 2, Al Torres running the club in Showgirls. Television then handed him a lead, Bailey Malone in NBC's Profiler from 1996 to 2000, which ran for 88 episodes. Later work leans on the same authority in smaller doses, Leo Marks in The Iceman, Ray Ferritto in Kill the Irishman, Goran Vata in The Expendables 3. In 2011 he launched a second career singing the Sinatra songbook.