Many times when I watch a movie, I’m more than familiar with all the actors involved. Oh, not every single actor, mind you, not the dozen or so with a line or two, but every supporting player and lead. Especially if it’s a big movie, with a big budget, most of the important roles are filled by actors familiar to the audience. Now a smaller, low budget or independently produced movie, on the other hand, might be filled with actors I don’t know and never will. And so throughout a movie-watching career, I’ve built up a number of actors that I know, primarily, for one movie. They might not be one-hit wonders (or they may be) but as far as I’m concerned, that’s all they’ve ever done. On the TCM schedule tonight is a prime example of that for me, a Best Picture winner no less, filled with actors that I know, pretty much, just from that one movie, Oliver! And there are so many others.
Let’s start with Oliver! It stars Ron Moody as Fagin and he’s simply great in the role, earning himself a richly deserved nomination for Best Actor in the process. Although I’ve seen him in a few other things, most notably The Twelve Chairs and one of the Margaret Rutherford Miss Marples, he’s pretty much Fagin to me and that’s it. But the rest of the cast is even more intensely singular to this one outing, and remember, this was a huge, mega-budgeted production. Jack Wild may have gone on to do H.R. Pufnstuf but I never watched that and know him only from Oliver! Shani Wallis? Oliver! That’s it. Mark Lester? Oliver! Harry Secombe? Seen him in a couple of things on TCM but, for the most part, Oliver! Really, outside of Oliver Reed, the whole cast is a collection of actors that I solely identify with this single movie.
It must have something to do with musicals because musicals tend to be the kind of super big budget movies that can have largely unknown casts because the success of the stage production is what sells it. It makes it all the more perplexing that Jack Warner would substitute Audrey Hepburn for Julie Andrews for the film version of My Fair Lady but, there you have it. Anyway, like I was saying, although it’s not something that happens all the time, a successful stage musical can be brought to the screen with no big stars simply because the musical itself was such a big hit. Fiddler on the Roof is another classic example as the only actor in it I first associate with something other than Fiddler on the Roof is Paul Michael Glaser, who I associate with Starsky and Hutch, first and foremost. I’ve seen the other actors in other movies, like Topol in For Your Eyes Only, for instance, but really, if I see any of them in anything else I’ll simply think, as I did with For Your Eyes Only, “Hey, that’s the guy from Fiddler on the Roof!”
Of course, most of the time, this is all chalked up to the fact that many hard working actors, putting in years of solid work in movie after movie, have only one or two big movies for which they might be known. The actors in The Warriors, for instance, have lots of other credits but, with the exception of James Remar, I will always associate them, one and all, with The Warriors and the The Warriors alone. Hell, even James Remar, despite having over 150 credits on IMDB, including, of course, the very popular tv show, Dexter, will always be associated pretty much solely with The Warriors as far as I’m concerned.
Maria Schneider did dozens of movies, including The Passenger with Jack Nicholson, but Last Tango in Paris is what I will always know her for. I’ve only ever seen one other movie beyond the 70s that she acted in, the 1996 version of Jane Eyre, with William Hurt and Anna Paquin, and that made little to no impression on me so I’m afraid for Maria, we’ll always have Paris. Actually, that goes for the rest of the cast, too, excepting Marlon Brando and Jean-Pierre Léaud.
Other actors are victims of their own success. Dorothy Comingore was excellent as Susan Alexander Kane in Citizen Kane and the movie was as big as they get. Massive controversy and publicity, good and bad, swirled around the movie at the time of its release, leaving critics in awe and studio heads scrambling to appease William Randolph Hearst. But according to Orson Welles, in his conversations with Peter Bogdanovich, Comingore was so careful of her career after Kane that she turned down almost everything that came her way until very little came her way at all. For the entire rest of the decade she only made two more movies. As a result, I and most other classic movie fans associate her almost uniquely with Citizen Kane.
Mark Hamill is another victim of great success with the Star Wars movies pretty much dooming him to being associated with only the Star Wars movies forever (not that that is in any way a bad thing but for an actor hoping to do more, it probably doesn’t help). Unable to become the megastar that Harrison Ford became, and despite years of solid voice work, Hamill will always be Luke Skywalker to me and nothing else.
Whether it’s Brian Blessed (“Gordon’s alive!”) or Gary Lockwood (“Hey, it’s the other astronaut from 2001!”), some actors you know from just one movie despite having been in countless others. In many ways, it’s a good thing. Thousands of actors are never known for even one stint so if you’ve got even one movie that everyone knows you for, that’s one more than so many others. If it’s successful enough, maybe it’s all you’ll ever need. Just ask Carrie Henn.