Steven Hill
Steven Hill is an actor, born 1922.
Steven Hill worked in American television from the live-broadcast era to the end of the century, which is a long time to keep the same face on. The earliest credits here are anthology drama: Lights Out in 1949, Playhouse 90, Espionage. In 1966 he became the first leader of the Impossible Missions Force, Dan Briggs, the man receiving the tape in Mission: Impossible, for a single season before the show carried on with a new team leader.
What he was good at was withholding. Hill delivered a line as though saying it cost him something, and he could make a pause do the work most actors need a speech for. As district attorney Adam Schiff on Law & Order, ten seasons of it from 1990, he ran the back half of every episode from behind a desk, approving plea deals he plainly found distasteful and closing scenes with a shrug and one dry sentence. The role brought him two Primetime Emmy nominations for Outstanding Supporting Actor, and it is why a generation of viewers can identify a district attorney by weariness alone.
The film work is a supporting-actor sampler with a large hole in the middle: the credits listed here jump from The Slender Thread in 1965 to Eyewitness in 1981, after which he is suddenly everywhere, playing fathers, bosses and lawyers in Streisand's Yentl, Lumet's Running on Empty, Billy Bathgate, Heartburn, White Palace and Pollack's The Firm, where he is the FBI director laying out the trap. He was born in Seattle in 1922 and died in 2016.
Movies (14)
TV (9)
Where to start with Steven Hill
Law & Order is the answer, and any episode from its first decade will do, because his job on that show was to be reliable rather than showy. Watch how often the scene belongs to him despite him doing almost nothing.
For film, Running on Empty gives him his finest few minutes, an estranged father across a restaurant table who will not make anything easier for anyone. The Firm uses him for exactly what he is, the man in the room who already knows how this goes. Billy Bathgate and Yentl are where he gets to be warm, which is rarer than it should be. Mission: Impossible is the curiosity: one season of a famous show with a leading man who refused to sell it, and he is better than its reputation allows.