My obituary of the great character actor Allen Garfield went up on the Daily Telegraph's website on 30 April. I missed it at the time, and because trips to the shops are limited, didn't see whether it was in the paper paper. What follows is basically my original piece, written short and succinct to give it a better chance of squeezing in to the paper in these sad times, though I have added a bit about the background to the filming of Chief Zabu. I re-watched The Conversation recently, and was again impressed with how brilliant he is playing Harry Caul's opposite, and how nicely John Cazale is pulled between them. What's interesting to note that Coppola always claimed Gene Hackman had trouble adjusting to the Caul character, as he personally was far closer to Garfield's personality.
ALLEN GARFIELD, ACTOR
Allen Garfield, who
has died aged 80, was one of the finest character actors of his
generation, turning supporting parts into memorable roles. Denied
leads because his appearance failed to match his talent, his made his
characters, often villainous, venal or corrupt seem real because they always seemed to accept who they were. In his own favourite film, Francis Coppola's
The Conversation, he played Bernie Moran, a wire-tapping rival
to Gene Hackman's Harry Caul, but one without Caul's crippling
conscience. He worked with Coppola again in One From The Heart
and in Cotton Club as Abbadabba Berman, the mob accountant
whose signature line “it's nothing personal, just business” was
borrowed to become crucial in The Godfather.
Garfield was born
Allen Goorwitz in Newark, New Jersey. In high school he began amateur
boxing, while working as a copy boy on the Newark Star-Ledger. “I
was going to be a journalist-boxer, the Jewish Hemingway,” he said.
But he was drawn to acting, and adapted part of the film Tomorrow The
World for his high school's theatre. He studied acting in New York
under Anthony Mannino while working as a journalist and editor, but
it was a play he wrote in the mid-Sixties that impressed William
Devane, who though the same age as Garfield, had already played in
Joe Papp's New York Shakespeare Fesitival and Off-Broadway in the hit
poliutical spoof MacBird. Devane was head of theatre writing at the
Actors Studio, and admitted Goorwitz as a writer/director, telling
him to "make some waves". He soon wound up in acting
classes under Lee Strasburg and Harold Clurman, and took the stage
name Garfield in tribute to Body And Soul star John Garfield. His
own first film role came in 'Orgy Girl '69', a film in which, he was
quick to point out, “there was no orgy!”
Three of Brian
dePalma's early films showed his talent for quirky comedy and began
his pattern of repeat performances for appreciative directors. His
first lead came in John Avildsen's Cry Uncle, playing a short
fat private detective who fancies himself a ladies man. “It was one
of a kind,” he explained, when other leads did not materialise. He
did much episodic television; later in his career he played in a
Faustian episode of Tales From The Dark Side. When a young
Bradley Whitfield refuses to believe he is the Devil, saying “you've
been watching too much bad TV”, Garfield replies devilishly “I
like bad TV'.
Robert Altman cast
him in Nashville, as the emotionally fragile singer Ronee Blakely's
husband/agent. “It was painful...Altman allowed me to take
responsibility for my character: over-bearing, loving, bullying.”
After his parents died, Garfield dropped his stage name in their
honour; he was billed as Goorwitz in some of his best work, starting
with William Fiedkin's The Brink's Job, alongside character
actor stalwarts Peter Falk, Peter Boyle and Paul Sorvino. In Richard
Rush's The Stunt Man he's the screenwriter foil to Peter
O'Toole's ego-maniacal director, “like Don Quixote and Sancho
Panza”. Five years later, in Wim Wenders' The State Of Things,
he reclaimed his stage name, at the urging of Shelly Winters. “Make
life easy for yourself,” she said. “Garfield really suits you”.
He was billed as
Garfield in Cotton Club, the overlooked Desert Bloom,
and his most familiar part today, the bombastic Chief Lutz in Beverly
Hills Cop II. “I love making a ton of money doing big pictures,
but if I believe in a film, as I did with Desert Bloom, which
we did for hardly anything, I'll do it.”
Garfield suffered a
stroke in 1998, just before filming The Ninth Gate, but Roman
Polanski rewrote his part to include his part-frozen face. He ceased
acting after a major stroke in 2004, and moved into the Motion
Picture Home in Woodland Hills. But he had an unexpected final lead
role, when Chief Zabu, a film he believed in and made
for almost nothing in 1986, was finally shown in 2016. It was the
brainchild of another New York character actor, Zach Norman, and was
shot on a college campus, with students handling most of the
technical duties and the cast bunking in the dorms. Norman was a
successful real-estate magnate, and in the movie Garfield plays a
brash upwardly-mobile real estate tycoon, caught up in a plot to take
over a new Polynesian island nation. Killed by distribution and other
problems when it was made, its satirical echoes of Donald Trump
brought Chief Zabu back into the public eye, thirty years too
late. Garfield died 7 April 2020, when coronavirus spread through his
nursing home.
Allen Garfield,
actor
born 22 November
1939, Newark, New Jersey
died 7 April 2020,
Woodland Hills, California
survived by his sister, Lois
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