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M. Emmet Walsh, a potbellied, prolific character actor whom critic Roger Ebert called “the poet of sleaze” for his naturalistic portrayals of repellent thugs and miscreants, died Tuesday in St. Albans, a small northern town. from Vermont. He was 88 years old.
His death, in a hospital, was announced by his manager, Sandy Joseph.
The most lasting praise Walsh received also came from Ebert: he coined the Stanton-Walsh rule, which stated that “no film featuring Harry Dean Stanton or M. Emmet Walsh in a supporting role can be entirely bad.”
In “Straight Time,” a 1978 film starring Stanton and Walsh, Walsh played a condescending parole officer to Dustin Hoffman’s floundering ex-convict. Mr. Walsh’s performance caught the attention of two brothers who were aspiring authors and were writing the script for their first feature film.
Unknowns Joel and Ethan Coen wrote the pivotal detective character in “Blood Simple” for Mr. Walsh. To his surprise, and despite offering little more in compensation than a per diem, he accepted the position.
Reviewing “Blood Simple” for The New York Times in 1984, Janet Maslin said Walsh had captured “a mischief that is perfect for the role.” Writing in Salon on the occasion of the launch of Janus Films’ digital restoration in 2016, Andrew O’Hehir praised Mr Walsh’s performance of a “sleazy, cheerful and deeply disturbing private detective.”
On set, he enjoyed harassing neophyte directors. “Let’s cut this whole sophomore thing, it’s not NYU anymore,” Joel Coen recalled him saying, according to a Times article in 1985. “I once asked him to do something just to please me and he said, ‘Joel, ‘This whole thing.’ The damn movie is just for fun.’”
After the film’s critical success (Walsh won the first Independent Spirit Award for Best Performance by an Actor), the Coen Brothers brought Walsh back for a cameo in their second film, “Raising Arizona.”
Also in that film, in addition to Nicolas Cage and Holly Hunter, was John Goodman, who became a regular with the Coen brothers, while Walsh did not. With Goodman on board, Walsh said in an interview for Janus Films’ “Blood Simple” issue, “his casting needs no longer involved me.”
Michael Emmet Walsh was born on March 22, 1935 in Ogdensburg, New York. His father, Harry Maurice Walsh Sr., was a customs agent on the Vermont-Quebec border; his mother, Agnes Katherine (Sullivan) Walsh, kept house.
Mr. Walsh grew up in rural Swanton, Vermont, and attended nearby Clarkson University in upstate New York, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in business administration while dabbling in theater productions.
“I had a good faculty advisor who said to me, ‘Why wait until you’re 40 to ask yourself if you should have been an actor?’ Get rid of him now or find out!’” Walsh said in an interview from 2011 at the Los Angeles Silent Cinema. “So I went to New York.”
He studied acting at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and also, less formally, in New York theaters. Since she couldn’t afford the tickets, she would sneak into the crowd at intermission.
“There was always an empty seat. And you see everything! he said. “I saw Annie Bancroft do ‘Miracle Worker’ with Patty Duke, probably 40 times; ‘Raisins in the Sun’ with Sidney Poitier. And I just looked at them.”
Deaf in his left year since a mastoid operation when he was 3, and with a clipped Vermont accent, Mr. Walsh said: “It was obvious I wasn’t going to do Shaw and Shakespeare and Molière; my speech was just too bad. “
“People go and try to become the next Pacino,” he continued, “or the next Meryl Streep or something, they don’t want that. They want something new, something different, they want you! And actors have a hard time understand it.” So I had to figure out who I was and what I could do that no one else could do.”
He performed in regional theaters throughout the Northeast for nearly a decade and then made his Broadway debut in “Does a Tiger Wear a Tie?” (1969), starring Al Pacino.
Some roles in television commercials led to an uncredited role in “Midnight Cowboy” that same year. He then landed the role of the irate and incomprehensible Army sergeant of Group G in Arthur Penn’s film adaptation of Arlo Guthrie’s song “Alice’s Restaurant.”
Then came around 120 film roles over the next five decades, and even more television roles. Critics took notice: he was a “cynical small-town sportswriter” in “Slap Shot” (1977), a “crazy sniper” in “The Jerk” (1979), a “drinking, sleazy police veteran” and underhanded.” in “Blade Runner” (1982) and an “unfriendly swimming coach” in “Ordinary People” (1980).
In a 2011 profile for LA Weekly, the critic Nicolas Rapold called Walsh “a consummate old professional in the second banana business.”
“My job is to go in and move the story forward,” he said in the Silent Movie Theater interview. “Stars don’t do the exposition… So I go to Redford or Newman or Dustin or someone, I throw the ball to them and they throw it back, and it starts to become that tennis match, back and forth, and that’s it. It is what marks the dynamic of the whole thing.”
“And I’m pushing the movie forward,” he added. “They don’t want an Emmet Walsh. They want a bus driver. They want a police officer. They don’t want an Emmet Walsh cop. I just try to sublimate myself, get in there and do it.”
Walsh was confident in his ability to deliver and knew how valuable that was to beleaguered filmmakers. “You’re launching something and you have 12 problems; “If they have me, they only have 11 problems.”
He said directors sought him out for his ability to elevate poor quality material. “They’d say, ‘This is terrible shit: get Walsh.’ At least it makes it believable. And I got a lot of those jobs.”
The reviews reflected that. Walsh was often singled out in otherwise forgettable films: for a “fine individual performance” in “The Fish That Saved Pittsburgh” (1979), as for “reliable talent” in “The Best of Times” (1979). 1986).
That’s not to say it never failed; His performance in “Wild, Wild West” (1999) led Ebert to consider the Stanton-Walsh rule “invalidated.”
In 2018, Walsh’s “Blade Runner” co-star Harrison Ford inducted him into the Character Actors Hall of Fame. At that same ceremony, he was honored with the Chairman’s Lifetime Achievement Award.
He continued acting in recent years, including in the 2019 film “Knives Out” and a 2022 episode of the Showtime series “American Gigolo.”
Walsh leaves no immediate survivors. He lived in St. Albans and Culver City, California.
Of his own work, he told comedian Gilbert Gottfried on a 2018 episode of his podcast: “There’s a lot of stuff out there. Not everyone is ‘Hamlet’. But I’m not ashamed of any of that.”
“All the roles are his children,” Walsh said in a 1989 interview with the trade newspaper Drama-Logue. “They will be my epitaph when they throw that last shovelful of dirt.”
Alex Traub contributed reports.