I have to admit that I am drawn to actors and actresses who have a problem finding starring work because studio bosses (and for that matter writers, producers and even directors) can’t figure out quite what to do with them. The reason for this is that they seem to be able to play only dark characters — which is also the reason I rather enjoy their work.
The above statement is probably a little obscure, so let me explain it by focusing on three of these people who to my mind exemplify the problem. All are brilliant actors, all have the ability to take over any scene (at the expense of whoever is playing the scene with them), and they all do it without really wanting to, I think. Here’s the first.
Dabney Coleman played so many roles in his long career that you’d think that he had no problem getting work. And he didn’t, provided that it wasn’t as the star of his own show, or the leading man in a movie. His dark, sardonic nature and biting, sarcastic manner of speaking always had me howling with laughter. A simple example was when he played a TV spokesman for 7-11, back in the 1980s. I still remember one commercial where he was “interviewing” some moron, who was spouting all sorts of twaddle, and when the speech ended, Dabney (with his typical comedic timing) waited for just one second, and said, “I bet your mother is very proud of you.” He also played a brilliant bad guy, whether the Agency boss in The Man With One Red Shoe, the Hugh Hefner-type smut tycoon in Dragnet, or the evil boss in 9 To 5. Yet his own TV shows (Slap Maxwell and Buffalo Bill) weren’t hits — which was criminal, because they were both beyond-words brilliant — because I think that to the average viewer, Dabney was unlikable — even though on real life, he was apparently anything but. Every single person who ever worked with him had nothing but good things to say about Dabney Coleman.
The same is more or less true for John Larroquette, who, if you look at his screen credits, has been truly successful. Like Dabney Coleman, though, John has always been something of a dark character, even when playing straight comedy (e.g. Night Court). I think I first saw him as Kim Basinger’s psychotic ex-boyfriend in Blind Date (which still ranks as one of the best comedies ever filmed, mostly because of Larroquette’s brilliant, insane performance); and ever since then, I’ve loved watching him do his stuff. Yet his best performance was not comedic. That came when he played a recovering alcoholic running the night shift in a city bus station in The John Larroquette Show. This was a classic example where a good actor is let down by bad writing. The show ran for over eighty episodes, and while his costar Liz Torres scooped up award after award, Larroquette himself was only ever nominated a couple of times: proof, if any was needed, that his unquestioned talent wasn’t apparent to most people.
Finally, we come to Lucy Punch, the aptly-named Brit actress who leaves me openmouthed with astonishment whenever I see her perform. I first saw her in the wonderful Doc Martin TV show, playing the very eccentric — and rather sinister — receptionist for the hemophobic Cornish doctor. She only lasted a few episodes before being replaced by the equally- eccentric, but definitely not sinister Kathleen Parkinson, and I think that may be why she was replaced: Lucy always looked on the verge of murdering someone with an axe, and that’s not really the kind of character you want in a soft, cuddly sitcom.
Then I saw her playing that psychotic character in Dinner For Schmucks… and the vision of Lucy attacking Paul Rudd’s Porsche 911 with an axe remains with me to this day. (The similarities between John Larroquette playing an obsessive psychotic ex-partner, and Lucy more or less reprising that role have not escaped me, either. The difference, though, was that Larroquette was funny, whereas Lucy was pure evil.) She’s since appeared in the Brit TV show Motherland, and she was so good that her character was spun off into her own show Amandaland. I haven’t seen either show yet because they’re not being streamed on Netflix or Amazon Prime, but I guess I’ll just have to be patient. (Oh, and just the thought of Joanna Lumley playing Amanda’s mother in the latter show… have mercy.)
Anyway, I guess that loving these wonderful, but rather twisted actors says something about me, but I couldn’t be bothered with thinking about that.
