Nicky Katt.

b. May 11th, 1970

Nicky Katt! His official website claims that he is "a kohl-eyed actor who has oozed a steady stream of low-key testosterone through a series of films..." Gross!
Nicky Katt! A career of playing police officers, SWAT officers, detectives, businessmen, bullies, thugs and other manly roles! Including Hitler, in Full Frontal! And also an "ill fated, racist child rapist, in A Time To Kill", according to wikipedia, which is a film I'm pretty sure I've seen but don't remember anything about!
Nicky Katt! I first noticed your angry shirtless antics in Dazed and Confused, where you beat up Adam Goldberg! And then in SubUrbia where you wore a sexy muscle t-shirt and were really mean to Giovanni Ribisi! And then in Insomnia, where you told that "What has two thumbs and likes blowjobs? THIS guy" joke, and I had never heard it before and thought it was so meatheadedly stupid that I laughed more than the joke warranted! And then in The Burbs, where you are only a child but were even then playing hulking bullies!
Nicky Katt! Internet fans who love you say that you ride around LA on a Harley in a WW2 helmet! They also miss seeing you in more film roles, writing things on Myspace like "We all carry around baggage and wounds and weaknesses, but you know what, we keep going. We don't give up. Even if it means we can only be a day player, we do it." You are so manly your website is illustrated with bald eagles! Nicky Katt! You are pretty great.

Raven Goodwin.

b. June 24th, 1992

Raven Goodwin was such a lovely child actor - well, lovely is perhaps the wrong word, because she often played children who were prickly or had difficult problems to deal with, or both. She did this most impressively in Lovely and Amazing, playing Brenda Blethyn's daughter. It's a really good film, if you want an evening dealing with some pretty stressful characters and situations (Goodwin is a ten-year-old who likes to pretend she's drowned when at the pool. And that's sorta one of the lighter aspects.)

Actually, a lot of Goodwin's most memorable roles involve lending a serious emotional centre to the films and TV shows she appears in. ABC's  Huge, for my money one of the best teen shows since Freaks and Geeks, is this great series which takes place in a fat camp. Goodwin plays the shy, thoughtful moral conscience of the show, (in contrast with Nikki Blonsky's impulsive whirlwind of a lead). The episode where she organises a camp-wide LARP is a particular highlight. It's a sin and a shame this only lasted one season.

Goodwin's adorable role as a "perky little teen" in an episode of 30 Rock, and her regular appearances on TV shows like the Disney channel's Good Luck Charlie, which seem to be the bread and butter of her career, show that she's a great comedic actress too, even in indifferent material. Her list of roles is depressingly small though. Is it because she's big? Because she's a woman of colour? Because she's doing other things than acting? I hope it's the last one, because she's too good to not be in more.

Tommy Noonan

b.29th April 1921;
d.24th April 1968

The not-that-great 1955 heist film Violent Saturday had pretty much only two highlights for me - one was seeing Ernest Borgnine, playing an Amish farmer, of all things, finally get angry enough to go against his pacifist code and plunge a pitchfork through Lee Marvin's chest, and the other was seeing Tommy Noonan in a weird, meandering subplot about a shy banker who is a peeping tom. When the pretty nurse he's been spying on finds out he's been following her home and looking through her window, she laughs and says she'll remember to draw her curtains from now on. You see that attitude in popular culture a lot - that if the guy being a creeper is a bashful nerd then it's treated as sort of harmless. It's messed up!

Noonan played shy nerds often - he's possibly best known for his part in Howard Hawks' Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, where he's Mr. Augustus Esmond, the fiance of Marilyn Monroe's character. He plays Mr. Esmond as a nervous fool, with hesitant vocal tics that feel like they're modeled on the ones Cary Grant used in Hawks' Bringing Up Baby. Another notable role was as Judy Garland's pianist buddy in the George Cukor musical melodrama A Star is Born, which I haven't seen (though it sounds neat).

Primarily, Noonan was a comedian - half of the comedy duo Noonan and Marshall, with Peter Marshall. They appeared on TV a bunch in the 1950s, including on the Ed Sullivan show. A lot of the film work Noonan did was in comedies which sound awful but which have great titles: What, No Cigarettes?; How to be Very, Very Popular; Ding Dong Williams; the painfully dismal sounding Cottonpickin' Chickenpickers. Later in his life he wrote, directed and starred in softcore sex comedies, including 3 Nuts in Search of a Bolt, which starred Mamie van Dooren - the trailer promises that "You'll wheeeee with glee at Mamie's uninhibited love stuff!"

Tommy Noonan's brother was the actor John Ireland, who was in Spartacus, All The King's Men, and My Darling Clementine, among about a million other things. He is unrelated and not to be confused with the awesome actor Tom Noonan, star of Manhunter, Heat and Robocop 2. 

Mark Williams

b. August 22, 1959.

Mark Williams is one of those British actors who shows up in absolutely everything in small roles - probably most recognisable as Arthur Weasley (Ron's dad) in the Harry Potter movies, though for Dr. Who fans he's Rory's dad, and Red Dwarf nerds he's Lister's buddy Olaf.

Aside from those, Williams often appears in TV comedy, most famously in 'The Fast Show', some just awful children's films (the horrible live action adaptations of The Borrowers and
101 Dalmatians;  Agent Cody Banks 2), and period piece dramas, from the awesome (Tristram Shandy: a Cock and Bull Story) to the forgettable (Albert Nobbs). He also presents documentary shows, such as the excellently titled 'Mark Williams' Big Bangs', about the history of explosives. Even when he's in something terrible like the nigh-blasphemous BBC adaptation of 'Gormenghast', he's really enjoyable to watch. He's not handsome and has no chin but his manner makes me think he's sweet and funny, even when playing decidedly unsweet characters. The decidedly unsweet character Deggsy, in Steve Coogan's throughly underrated show 'Saxondale', appears in only one episode, but it is one of my favourite Mark Williams roles - he's an old, leering roadie who is limping with gout but insists on partying like he isn't falling apart at the seams.

I found a lot of fascinating claims about Mark Williams on the internet, but that's partly because there are billions of people named Mark Williams - I know two personally - and I'm really sad to say that this guy is not the Mark Williams who is married to pornstar Linsey Dawn McKenzie, star of Maximum Insertion who has appeared on shows like 'The Weakest Link' and 'I'm Famous and Frightened!' (her husband Mark Williams is a former soccer player), nor is he the Mark Williams who wrote The Mindful Way Through Depression: Freeing Yourself From Chronic Unhappiness. Darn it.

If you want to write to Mark Williams, you could try this address:
Mark Williams,
c/o Caroline Dawson Associates,
2nd Floor,
125, Gloucester Road,
London
SW7 4TE

Some people have done so, but beware!

Post subject: Mark Williams successI sent a letter and SAE to Mark on: 11th August 2011, and today I recieved this signed and personalized photo back from him, altogether i think the personaliztion is a sec.  

Jeremie Renier

b. January 6th, 1981.

Ok so it has been a while (again) since I’ve written anything here, but I still enjoy recognising character actors, and then finding out trivia about them, and as long as that’s a thing in my life then I may well keep adding little bits here and there when I can.

Almost all the actors and actresses I’ve written about here so far have been from the USA, (except Eric Blore, who was British but mostly starred in American movies, and Art Hindle who is Canadian) so I’m going to try and write about a few from other places. The one difficult thing I’ve found with this is that the whole feeling of discovery or recognition of a non-star which I’ve been using as criterion for this blog is often compromised the minute you start talking about stars of non-English language films: I mean, I get a sweet flash of “oh shit, it’s that one girl from The Host and Linda Linda Linda!” whenever I see Doona Bae crop up in anything, but in South Korea she’s a HUGE star, so huge that it’s a bit ridiculous to be pointing her out in the introductory way I do in these posts. It’d be like, Hey everyone, have you also heard of this one actress called Meryl Streep possibly?

So, that’s my rationale for not including more non-English speaking actors. However, I really really like this one: though he’s probably one of the biggest, most easily recognised Belgian film stars, I’m going to include him because he still has ‘That One Guy’ status in English language films. Jeremie Renier.

I first saw Renier in some films by the amazing, amazing Belgian directing team Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne – first L’Enfant (2005), then going back through their catalogue, La Promesse (1996), which Renier starred in when he was only 16, followed by Lorna’s Silence (2008), and the slightly disappointing The Kid With A Bike (2011). The Dardennes tend to make understated, thoughtful films about blue collar work (or the struggle to find and hold on to it) and often concern characters who are forced into making difficult ethical decisions. In most of his roles in their films, Renier plays likeable flakes who make terrible life choices: in L’Enfant he and his girlfriend are homeless so he sells their baby; in La Promesse he hides the death of an illegal immigrant from the immigrant’s wife in an effort to ease her pain; in The Kid with a Bike he’s a responsibility-shy father who lets his son down when he’s most needed. On paper, these characters sound like jerks, and I guess onscreen they are as well, though they aren’t stupid jerks – they always seem be able to see paths they could take that would lead them to more ethical behaviour towards others, but a combination of their life situations and incredible passivity keep them from taking those paths.

Renier is also, it would appear, the go – to guy for slick big-budget English language films when they need a generic cute Belgian or French guy. He crops up in the egregious In Bruges, and as a wounded soldier in Atonement. He’s the rough hewn vintner in The Vintner’s Luck. He often shows up in the sort of lighthearted ‘arthouse’ films that middle class, middle aged white women seem to really like – Potiche, Summer Hours.
It’s probably only because he’s in it, but I’m curious now about the recently released biopic Renier stars in – Cloclo, about the singer Claude Francois. I really hope it means I’ll get to see Renier recreate videos like this one:  

I

Higgins

b. 12 December 1957
d. 11 November 1975

At one point in the 1987 film Benji the Hunted, a man shoots a cougar. I was four when I saw this, and this scene caused me to run screaming into the lobby: it remains one of the more traumatic film-going experiences of my life. I didn’t revisit the Benji franchise until adulthood.

Director Joe Camp has made a career of churning out films about Benji, a little dog who solves problems. Like Star Wars, the first three are the only ones you really need to bother about: Benji the Hunted (1987); For the Love of Benji (1977) and the first one, Benji (1974), starring Higgins in the title role. Joe Camp, as made clear by his website, is a Christian, family-values-y type filmmaker, keen on ‘cleaning up’ children’s entertainment. Nevertheless, my four-year-old experience rings true to my adult reception of the film – while the films are charming and wholesome, they’re also really, really distressing. In Benji, our hero lives in an abandoned house, which later becomes a hideout for some bumbling thugs who have kidnapped two children. Just to let you know that these are really bad guys, at one point one of them kicks Benji’s little dog girlfriend across the room, breaking her leg. It’s a moment of surprising violence that’s typical of the world of the Benji films, a comforting, friendly place in which there is some dark and disturbing shit lurking.

But anyway, Higgins. He gives an amazing performance in this film, part of the credit for which must go to his incredible trainer, Frank Inn. Inn found Higgins in a Berkeley animal shelter when he was a puppy (Higgins, not Inn), and the two had a very close working relationship. Higgins rose to fame as Dog in the TV series Petticoat Junction, which he appeared on regularly from 1964 to 1970. He also had appearances on Greenacres and The Beverly Hillbillies. Inn coached Higgins in a range of tricks, many of them complex: the dog could climb ladders; open boxes and pudding cups; sneeze, yawn, salute and cover his eyes with his eyes with his paws on command. This lovely post at luckymojo.com praises his lack of “trainer eye” – he never appears to be looking offscreen for cues from Inn. However, it is his range of facial expressions which really set Higgins apart as an actor. The promotional material for Benji states he has “the most expressive face in dogdom”, and it’s not a shallow boast. His performance is far more impressive than those of many of his human co-stars.

After his TV roles, Higgins had been ‘retired’ from showbusiness, but was brought out in his old age to star as Benji. He was 16 when the film was released, and died a year later. His daughter, Benjean, took over the role in subsequent Benji films, and her appearance in For the Love of Benji also shows some impressive canine acting chops. Joe Camp is still making Benji movies, and doing good work in encouraging adopting animals from shelters, but I have to say, the dogs he has playing Benji these days are nowhere near as appealing looking as Higgins. Camp’s children are also involved in the film industry – one son wrote and directed the Jennifer Aniston vehicle Love Happens (2009), and another has been a first assistant director on many, many films, from Barton Fink (1991) to Brothers (2009).

Frank Inn died in 2002. In his later life, he wrote several poems about Higgins, which are terrible, but in terms of the subject matter, also very touching. When he died, Higgins’ ashes were interred with him.

We all know that Polish film posters are awesome, yes? Here's the one for Benji. it's like he's sweating lovehearts!

I've written about Benji elsewhere online, at werewolf.co.nz

Michael Shannon.

b. August 7^th, 1974

When I started this blog, I wanted to focus on actors and actresses many people probably recognise, but whose name you might not necessarily know, and I decided a few months back that I’d like to do a post about Michael Shannon, because I think he’s just grand. I feel like right now he’s on that cusp though, perhaps not of becoming a huge star, but definitely of being a character actor who is a little more than “that guy who was in that other thing”, someone who gets third billing in the occasional summer action flick, and first billing in indie dramas, like a Giovanni Ribisi or Dermot Mulroney.

I first remember noticing Shannon in the late, great Sidney Lumet’s 2007 film Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead. (Possible Spoiler Warning) He plays the brother-in-law of a crook who died in a failed heist orchestrated by Ethan Hawke and Phillip Seymour Hoffman, and generally has to lounge about and be threatening to Hawke. Man, that doesn’t really seem like an acting task you’d have to put much effort into, but Shannon almost walks away with the entire film, which in a cast of fairly strong hitters is no mean feat. My boyfriend and I were pausing the dvd after each scene he was in to exclaim “who is this guy?” and “We have to have seen him in something before, there is no way someone can be this good, this distinctive and strange, and not have showed up being awesome in something else.”

Checking ye olde IMDB confirmed that I had indeed seen him being awesome in something else- Jeff Nichols’ Shotgun Stories, a deceptively low-key independent tragedy of Shakespearian proportions about two families of half-brothers locked in a blood feud following the death of their father. Shannon plays the eldest brother with a mixture of quiet dignity and barely repressed rage. He also has apparently been in a million and one HUGE movies which completely passed me by – Revolutionary Road, Pearl Harbour, Vanilla Sky. He’s set to play General Zod in the next Superman movie.

So, when Take Shelter, the next film directed by Nichols, and also starring Michael Shannon, came around, I was pretty psyched to see it. It was during the film festival in Wellington, I had my ticket for 9pm on a Friday night (nerd!), front row centre, and oh my I was not prepared for this film, or this performance. Shannon plays a loving father and husband, with a good blue-collar job in Ohio, who starts having violent nightmares, leading to paranoid delusions, leading to both trying to seek psychiatric care and to rapidly build a storm shelter in his back yard. Like in Shotgun Stories, Shannon plays a man who loves his family and is trying to do best by them, but in this case that requires asking for their help, and that’s a painfully difficult thing. There were moments in this film where I wasn’t just crying, I was shaking from feeling this character’s stress and fear so acutely. Shannon’s done his research – I was especially impressed by how, when he finally does tell his wife what is happening for him, his voice comes out thick and slurred, and his mouth moves like he’s having trouble forming the words. Times I’ve been in bad, bad depressions, I remember that happening, though I’d mostly forgotten it until I saw him do it. The film lags a little in the final five minutes, but that doesn’t take away much. I can’t wait for the dvd so I can watch it again, and I can’t wait to see Shannon in more.