I note with sadness the death of John Vernon. You won’t recognize his name unless you know a lot about movies, but it’s way better than even money that you’d know his face and voice in an instant. A Canadian character actor who came south to Hollywood, he specialized in playing a certain kind of villain–serious, deep-voiced, a bit prissy and creepy, almost visibly compromised–and did it with such vivid exactitude that he thereby found his way into a number of memorable films, among them Point Blank (his big-screen debut), Dirty Harry, Charley Varrick, and The Outlaw Josey Wales. Then he landed a part that allowed him to play his “natural” type for laughs, Dean Vernon Wormer of Animal House, seizing the opportunity with such self-evident relish that my generation will always remember him as the hapless stiff who put Delta House on double secret probation.
Like Strother Martin and J.T. Walsh, Vernon was that most admirable of small-part actors, a professional with flair, and I hope he gets some nice obits this weekend. (He made it into Friday’s Washington Post, but the New York Times, as is its increasingly frequent wont, dropped the ball.) He deserved them.