William Devane

William Devane came out of the theatre, with fifteen plays for the New York Shakespeare Festival and a 1966 off-Broadway turn as Robert F. Kennedy in the satire MacBird. Television made his name with two political parts: John F. Kennedy in the Cuban Missile Crisis drama The Missiles of October, and the blacklisted radio broadcaster John Henry Faulk in the Emmy-winning Fear on Trial. The sources on his date of birth disagree, so this page does not state one.

His instrument is the smile. It is wide, teeth-forward and entirely uninformative, and directors worked out early that it makes a man look like he is managing you. Hitchcock cast him as the villain in Family Plot, the last film he made, and Marathon Man the same year used him as a spy whose reassurance you should not accept. The great outlier is Rolling Thunder in 1977: a returning prisoner of war whose flat, patient calm is the most alarming thing in the picture, and the closest Devane came to a great leading role.

Television then took him for a decade, as the ambitious politician turned corporate operator Greg Sumner on Knots Landing, and again in the 2000s as Secretary of Defense James Heller across 24 and its revival. He made seven Jesse Stone films as the therapist Dr. Dix, and turned up on Early Edition and The Grinder.

Late-period Devane is institutional man in chief: the oversight man in Hollow Man, the crooked cop Carter in Payback, a NASA elder in Interstellar, the president in Stargate: Continuum, an official in Space Cowboys. The best of the late work is much older than that, though. Testament, in 1983, put him in a suburban nuclear-war drama and asked for nothing except an ordinary father, which he delivers without a trace of the usual charm.