Scene-stealing character actor earned Oscar nomination for Bonnie and Clyde
Michael J Pollard, who has died aged 80, was a scene-stealing character actor who earned an Oscar nomination for the landmark 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde, playing a getaway driver even though, off-screen, he never learned how to drive.
With a broad, cherubic face, dimpled chin, unruly hair and a charismatic presence described as ‘‘gnomelike’’, Pollard excelled at playing imps, half-wits and outright weirdos.
Pollard was the chronic-nosebleeding loser Hugo Peabody in the original Broadway production of the musical Bye Bye Birdie (1960), then had a brief apprenticeship with the Walt Disney
Co. He appeared in the Disney musical Summer
Magic (1963), opposite Hayley
Mills, before parting ways. ‘‘I wasn’t really the
Mickey Mouse image anyway,’’ he later told the New York Times.
A successful journeyman, he made TV appearances on series including Star Trek, Gunsmoke and The Andy Griffith Show .He also won admiring reviews as the 14-year-old messenger who delivers tragic War Department telegrams in a 1959 TV adaptation of William Saroyan’s World War II homefront story The Human Comedy.
His talent for improvisation earned him the admiration of Warren Beatty, who came to know Pollard when both worked on the sitcom The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis. Years later, Beatty used his clout as movie star and producer to hire Pollard as the gas-stationattendant-turned-accomplice C.W. Moss in Bonnie and Clyde. Its intermingling of bloodshed, almost farcical comedy and frank sexuality helped usher in a new era of violent imagery in mainstream cinema.
In one memorable sequence, Pollard parks the getaway car during a bank heist and finds – at the worst possible moment – that he can’t manoeuvre out of the parking space. ‘‘There was this guy teaching me [to drive], but I couldn’t learn,’’ he told film critic Roger
Ebert. ‘‘So here I was stuck in the parking place, and [director Arthur] Penn said, ‘OK, do it that way.’ ’’ In the nervous moments that delay their escape, Clyde shoots the bank teller in the face.
Pollard said he was unmoved by those who found Bonnie and Clyde too brutal. ‘‘That’s dopey, man,’’ he told Ebert. ‘‘Everybody’s violent. They’re criticising themselves. Everybody will realise that in a year or so and start on something else. I don’t know. Hey, maybe they’ll start on humour in movies. Too much humour in movies. Children laughing too much.’’
Bonnie and Clyde was nominated for 10 Academy Awards, including best picture, best director and best supporting actor (for Pollard). It won two: Burnett Guffey’s cinematography and Estelle Parsons’ supporting performance as Clyde’s sister-in-law.
The film remained the pinnacle of Pollard’s screen career, even as he continued working in dozens of films over the next five decades, playing all manner of eccentrics and creeps. He was rarely the subject of profiles, perhaps owing to his stream-of-consciousness answers to basic questions.
He was co-starring with Oliver Reed as Allied POWS in the World War II action movie Hannibal Brooks (1968) when he was asked to comment on the title of the film. The Times recorded his answer, of which this is only part: ‘‘Hannibal Brooks, Hannibal Brooks, Brooks Hannibal, Hamburger Brooks, Brooks Hamburger, Cheeseburger Brooks, Brooks Hannibal,
Hannibal Brooks, Brooks Atkinson Brooks . . . The film in set in World War II. As you know there were two World Wars – number one and number two. If you liked World War II, you will love this movie. I can only compare it to the long brown overcoat which reaches down to here. Or to standing in the doorway in St Louis in the rain. When you see this picture is playing, folks, you must run, not walk, to your local post office.’’
The son of a bar manager, Michael John Pollack Jr was born in Passaic, New Jersey. He changed his last name to Pollard. At 20, he was attending the Actors Studio workshop in New York when Marilyn Monroe, seeking to bolster her credibility as an actress, joined his class. According to Charles Casillo’s biography of Monroe, Pollard was the only man in the room with the guts to ask her to do a scene with him. They recited passages from Breakfast at Tiffany’s.
Pollard’s resume was vast, including the Roger Corman-produced biker film The Wild
Angels (1966), in which he said he ‘‘nearly killed’’ co-star Peter Fonda because he could never master driving a chopper. He also had a rare starring role as Billy the Kid in the lowbudget Dirty Little Billy (1972).
He was a recovering alcoholic, according to friend Dawn Walker, becoming sober in the 1980s. He went on to appear in Melvin and
Howard (1980), Roxanne (1987), Scrooged
(1988), the Beatty-directed Dick Tracy (1990), Tumbleweeds (1999) and Rob Zombie’s House
of 1000 Corpses (2003).
His marriages to actress Beth Howland, best known as the nervous waitress Vera on the sitcom Alice, and Annie Tolstoy ended in divorce. Survivors include a daughter from his first marriage and a son from his second marriage.
Pollard, who enjoyed the company of poets and rock musicians, was credited with inspiring the title of the group Traffic’s 1971 hit The Low Spark of High Heeled Boys ,by bandmates Steve Winwood and Jim Capaldi.
Capaldi told Goldmine magazine that he was travelling through Morocco with Pollard when the actor came up with the line. ‘‘It seemed to sum up all the people of that generation who were just rebels,’’ Capaldi said. ‘‘The ‘low spark’, for me, was the spirit, high-spirited. You know, standing on a street corner.’’