An Ode to Character Actors: Edward Everett Horton, Jay O. Saunders, Jackie Earle Haley

There are iconic actors whose names go down in history, and other actors who don't. I want to celebrate the ones that aren't household names, who've appeared in sometimes more films than any leading actor, in films with all those iconic names, sometimes unrecognizable from one work to the next, and whose contribution to arts and entertainment is immense. They are critical in defining the tone and genre, and the telling, of the stories they're in. Their work is always delicious. Especially in comedies, and equally bone-chilling in scary movies.

Lately I've been watching lots of classic black & white films with names like Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, Cary Grant, Katherine Hepburn and Clark Gable. And there's this guy you keep seeing, that's just so funny and delicious to watch. His name is Edward Everett Horton. You'd know him by face. And boy does he look familiar. Cause he's been in everything! Seeing him in a film makes "instant-happy."

Then seeing the brilliant and rip-roaringly funny (yeah, when done well, Shakespeare will have you bent over, holding your stomach) production of "Twelfth Night" in Central Park. I refer to him as "the drunk"... Jay O. Saunders. I could just watch only him through the entire show. I even followed his exit, studying his "drunkeness" waiting for it to crack. Nope, he was definitely drunk, through and through. Then reading the playbill when I got home, and discovering that he was "THE donkey" in the Park's horrible production of "Midsummer Night's Dream" 2 years back. He was the ONLY thing happening in that play, a performance I never forgot, and I studied him onstage too. I don't know what I hoped to find studying him, but I was completely mesmerized. I didn't realize that these two characters were the same actor! Today I discovered he was also the wife-envy neighbor in "Revolutionary Road." Again, didn't recognize him to be the same person as these other two.

And then there's Jackie Earle Haley. You couldn't convince me that he wasn't the person he portrayed in "Little Children," a tortured pedophile. Then to discover that he was the incredible actor who played Rorschach in the crap film "Watchmen"? He was so alive on that screen, so nuanced a performance, so real a person, I couldn't believe what I was seeing. He seemed so familiar. Then later discovered he was "the ped"! Mesmerizing.

I love these actors. Their presence, and their work. And especially character actors in older films during the studio system, where stock characters were a distinctive and colorful quality of the storytelling palate. It traces back to storytelling-entertainment roots in Commedia dell'arte, Shakespeare's theater, and vaudeville. Will write more later about stock characters and different forms of theater as extensions of folk storytelling and pagan ritual. Something I've been thinking about for years, while traveling, and studying pagan traditions, both, interconnected passions of mine.