M. Emmet Walsh, Character Actor Who Always Stood Out, Dies at 88.

In movies like “Knives Out” and “Blade Runner,” he played both major and minor roles. But he always left a lasting effect.

 

The critic Roger Ebert referred to the scrawny and prolific character actor M. Emmet Walsh as “the poet of sleaze” because of his realistic depictions of repulsive miscreants and lowlifes. Walsh passed away on Tuesday in St. Albans, a tiny town in northern Vermont. He was eighty-eight years old.

Sandy Joseph, his manager, made the announcement of his death at a hospital.

Mr. Ebert also bestowed onto Mr. Walsh the most enduring compliment when he established the Stanton-Walsh Rule, which states that “no movie featuring either Harry Dean Stanton or M. Emmet Walsh in a supporting role can be altogether bad.”

Both Mr. Stanton and Mr. Walsh starred in the 1978 movie “Straight Time,” where Mr. Walsh portrayed a condescending parole officer to Dustin Hoffman’s fragile ex-con. Two brothers who were writing their first feature film script and wanted to be auteurs were drawn to Mr. Walsh’s performance.

The crucial role of a detective in “Blood Simple” was written by Mr. Walsh’s unidentified collaborators Joel and Ethan Coen. He took the job, much to their astonishment, and offered little more than a daily stipend in recompense.

 

In her 1984 New York Times review of “Blood Simple,” Janet Maslin praised Mr. Walsh for capturing “a mischievousness that is perfect for the role.” In a 2016 Salon article, Andrew O’Hehir lauded Mr. Walsh’s portrayal of a “sleazy, giggly, and profoundly disturbing private investigator,” marking the debut of Janus Films’ digital restoration.

He enjoyed putting the rookie directors through their paces on the set. According to a Times piece from 1985, Joel Coen remembered him stating, “Let’s cut this sophomoric stuff, it’s not N.Y.U. anymore.” He once told me, “Joel, this whole damn movie is just to humor you,” when I requested him to do something for laughs alone.

Following the film’s critical acclaim—for which Mr. Walsh was honored with the first-ever Independent Spirit Award for outstanding actor performance—the Coen brothers invited Mr. Walsh to return for a brief appearance in their follow-up picture, “Raising Arizona.”

Along with Nicolas Cage and Holly Hunter, John Goodman was also in that film. Unlike Mr. Walsh, Goodman went on to become a frequent collaborator with the Coen Brothers. In an interview for the Janus Films version of “Blood Simple,” Mr. Walsh stated that “their casting needs didn’t involve me anymore” when Mr. Goodman joined the team.

On March 22, 1935, Michael Emmet Walsh was born in Ogdensburg, New York. Agnes Katherine (Sullivan) Walsh was the head of the family, while her father, Harry Maurice Walsh Sr., worked as a customs agent on the Vermont-Quebec border.

 

Raised in rural Swanton, Vermont, Mr. Walsh attended the adjacent Clarkson University in northern New York State, where he studied business administration and briefly pursued a career in theater.

“A terrific faculty mentor I had up there told me not to wait until I was forty years old to consider if acting was the right career path for me. Take it out right away, or find out! In an interview conducted at the Los Angeles Silent Movie Theater in 2011, Mr. Walsh stated. Thus, I traveled to New York.

In addition to receiving less formal training in New York theaters, he studied acting at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. Because he couldn’t afford tickets, he would sneak in during halftime.

Every seat was never filled. And you observe all of it!” he said. “I saw Annie Bancroft perform ‘Raisin in the Sun’ with Sidney Poitier and ‘Miracle Worker’ with Patty Duke, probably forty times.” I simply observed them.

Mr. Walsh, who has a clipped Vermont accent and has been deaf in his left ear since a mastoid ectomy when he was three years old, stated, “It was obvious I wasn’t going to do Shaw and Shakespeare and Molière — my speech was simply too bad.”

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“People go and try to become the next Meryl Streep or the next Pacino or whatever— they don’t want that,” he went on. They desire you because you’re something fresh and distinctive! Actors find it difficult to understand that. I thus had to discover who I was and what I was capable of doing that no one else was.

After spending the better part of a decade performing in regional theaters around the Northeast, he made his Broadway debut in the 1969 production of “Does a Tiger Wear a Necktie?” starring Al Pacino.

An uncredited part in “Midnight Cowboy” the same year was the result of a few parts in television ads. Later, he was cast as the grumpy and unintelligible sergeant in Group G Army in Arthur Penn’s film version of Arlo Guthrie’s song “Alice’s Restaurant.”

M EMMET PIC

 

Over the following fifty years, he would go on to play around 120 movie roles and many more television ones. He was a “bonkers sniper” in “The Jerk” (1979), a “cynical small-town sportswriter” in “Slap Shot” (1977), a “hard-drinking, sleazy and underhanded police veteran” in “Blade Runner” (1982), and an “unsympathetic swimming coach” in “Ordinary People” (1980), which made the reviewers take note.

Nicolas Rapold, a reviewer, described Mr. Walsh as “a consummate old pro of the second-banana business” in a 2011 feature for L.A. Weekly.

In the interview with Silent Movie Theater, he stated, “My job is to come in and move the story along.” “The exposition is not done by the stars… Thus, I enter the scene with Redford, Newman, Dustin, or another person, and I toss the ball to them. They return the favor, and the tension of the entire situation is created by this back-and-forth tennis match.

“And I’m propelling the film ahead,” he continued. “They’re not interested in Emmet Walsh. It’s a bus driver they want. They desire a police officer. They are opposed to having an Emmet Walsh police officer. I just attempt to go inside and do it by sublimating myself.

Mr. Walsh realized how important that was to busy filmmakers, and he was confident in his ability to deliver. “If they have me, they only have 11 problems; you’re casting something, and you have 12 problems.”

He said that because of his ability to improve mediocre material, filmmakers sought him out. “They would say, ‘Get Walsh, this is terrible crap.'” He does, at least, make it plausible. I was hired for several of those positions.

Reviews confirmed that. In otherwise unmemorable movies, Mr. Walsh was frequently called out—for example, in “The Fish That Saved Pittsburgh” (1979) for his “good individual performance” and in “The Best of Times” (1986) for his “dependable talent.”

That’s not to say he never made a mistake; in fact, Mr. Ebert considered the Stanton-Walsh Rule to be “invalidated” after seeing him in “Wild, Wild West” (1999).

Harrison Ford, Mr. Walsh’s co-star in “Blade Runner,” inducted him into the Character Actor Hall of Fame in 2018. He received the Chairman’s Lifetime Achievement Award on the same occasion.

He has kept up his acting in the last several years, appearing in episodes of Showtime’s “American Gigolo” in 2022 and the 2019 film “Knives Out.”

There are no direct survivors of Mr. Walsh. He was a resident of Culver City, California, and St. Albans.

In a 2018 podcast episode, he said to comic Gilbert Gottfried about his own body of work, saying, “There’s a lot of stuff out there.” Not all of them are “Hamlet.” But none of it makes me feel guilty.

In 1989, Mr. Walsh stated, “The parts are all your children,” during an interview with the trade publication Drama-Logue. “When they add that final shovelful of dirt, they’ll be my epitaph.”

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