Character actor who shined in several seedy, menacing roles
LOS ANGELES — M. Emmet Walsh, the character actor who brought his unmistakable face and unsettling presence to films including “Blood Simple” and “Blade Runner,” died March 19 at age 88, his manager said.
Mr. Walsh died from cardiac arrest at a hospital in St. Albans, Vt., his longtime manager Sandy Joseph said.
The ham-faced, heavyset Mr. Walsh often played good old boys with bad intentions, as he did in one of his rare leading roles as a crooked Texas private detective in the Coen brothers’ first film, the 1984 neo-noir “Blood Simple.”
Joel and Ethan Coen said they wrote the part for Mr. Walsh, who would win the first Film Independent Spirit Award for best male lead for the role.
Critics and film geeks relished the moments when he showed up on screen.
Roger Ebert once observed that “no movie featuring either Harry Dean Stanton or M. Emmet Walsh in a supporting role can be altogether bad.”
Mr. Walsh played a crazed sniper in the 1979 Steve Martin comedy “The Jerk” and a prostate-examining doctor in the 1985 Chevy Chase vehicle “Fletch.”
In 1982’s gritty, “Blade Runner,” a film he said was grueling and difficult to make with perfectionist director Ridley Scott, Mr. Walsh plays a hard-nosed police captain who pulls Harrison Ford from retirement to hunt down cyborgs.
Born Michael Emmet Walsh, his characters led
people to believe he was from the American South, but he could hardly have been from any further north.
Mr. Walsh was raised on Lake Champlain in Swanton, Vt., just a few miles from the U.S.-Canadian border, where his grandfather, father and brother worked as customs officers.
He went to a tiny local high school with a graduating class of 13, then to Clarkson University in Potsdam, N.Y., and the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York City.
He acted exclusively on the stage, with no intention of doing otherwise, for a decade, working in summer stock and repertory companies.
Mr. Walsh slowly started making film appearances in 1969 with a bit role in “Alice’s Restaurant,” and did not start playing prominent roles until nearly a decade after that when he was in his 40s, getting his breakthrough with 1978’ s “Straight Time,” in which he played Dustin Hoffman’s smug, boorish parole officer.
Mr. Walsh was shooting “Silkwood” with Meryl Streep in Dallas in the autumn of 1982 when he got the offer for “Blood Simple” from the Coen brothers, then-aspiring filmmakers who had seen and loved him in “Straight Time.”
And his more than 100 film credits included director Rian Johnson’s 2019 family murder mystery, “Knives Out” and director Mario Van Peebles’ Western “Outlaw Posse,” released this year.