Such TV actors
follow an honourable tradition that
started with the arrival of the talkies, with a few extras emerging from anonymity to
utter the occasional line or two, Sometimes they enjoyed a long career of doing just this
and nothing more. When one views their old films, sometimes it’s a face in the
background that seems vaguely familiar or the actor’s name near the bottom of the
credits that rings a bell. it can be difficult to identify who the actor is, and in such
cases Quinlan’s Illustrated Directory of Film
Character Actors is invaluable, with a photograph, brief biography and filmography.
(David Quinlan also compiles a companion volume of film stars.)
Fans of director
John Ford are particularly favoured when it comes to spotting familiar faces in the
background, for he had his own
“stock company” of actors whom he employed time and again. Included were several
who seldom said very much, including one or two former film notables who had slipped down
the cast lists —
his own brother, Frank, for example, and Torn
Tyler, best remembered as the villain shot by John Wayne at the end of Stagecoach.
One frustration can
be when no cast list appears at the end of the film, and here the marvellous website http://www.imdb.com
can help. It has yet to disappoint me, seemingly listing every film ever produced, each
with a synopsis, at least one review and viewers’ ratings. Its cast lists extend
beyond those mentioned in the film credits, with a link from the name of each actor to a
list of all his or her performances.
 The
website even has a section devoted to “big stars in hit parts”, sometimes
when they were mere extras. Their humble origins are also recalled in popular TV programmes such as Before They Were Famous. Roger Moore raised his
famous eyebrow as a stage-door johnnie in Trollie
True in 1949, and Errol Flynn played a corpse in one of his first films. Alan Ladd was
undistinguished in some 30 productions before his breakthrough, and ironically in Citizen Kane,
one of the last he appeared in before stardom, he was merely silhouetted against a
film screen on which a newsreel was being shown. Truly
he came out of the shadows.
The video recorder
is often a great boon, as you can play a film back to identify the “blink and
miss them” moment. I had to do this three times before spotting Ladd in his
seventh movie, Pigskin Parade. and I never did identify Clint Eastwood
as a posse member in the Western Star in the Dust.
Alfred Hitchcock was often a face in a crowd in films he directed, and keeping an eye
out for him can often distract one from the plot. (He had a challenge in Lifeboat, whose cast comprised just nine survivors
from a torpedoed ship, but his face appears as a photograph in a newspaper in the bottom
of their lifeboat.)
Nowadays there is
still as much demand for people to take walk-on —
one might say walk-by —
parts as there ever was, and extras can
dream, if not of stardom, then of a few seconds of fame through saying something. At least
they won’t have problems learning their lines.
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