ALLEN GARFIELD

(22 November 1939 - 7 April 2020)

The American actor Allen Garfield, who has died at the age of 80 from complications with the coronavirus, was a brilliant character actor. He was the sort of performer that Hollywood has always needed, players who can create a presence on film, not necessarily a star performance, but one that can inhabit a supporting role that rings true without descending into stereotype or caricature. Allen Garfield was one such actor. He generally played heavies, often villainous or shifty characters, corrupt salesmen and politicians. Born in Newark, New Jersey, to Jewish parents, Alice and Philip Goorwitz, Allen became a sports reporter and a boxer before studying acting at the Beverly Hills Playhouse. He later enrolled at the Actors’ Studio in New York under the tutelage of Lee Strasberg and Elia Kazan.

Allen Garfield had an extensive stage career before his film appearances took off in 1968, with a movie of five short stories called Orgy Girls ’69, then Greetings, Brian De Palma’s second feature, and also his Hi, Mom!, both with Robert De Niro. He was in Robert Downey Sr’s Putney Swope, followed by Herbert Ross’s The Owl and the Pussycat with Barbra Streisand and George Segal. From then on he was a fixture in many prestigious Hollywood films including Milos Forman’s Taking Off, Woody Allen’s Bananas, John G. Avildsen’s Super Dick (aka Cry Uncle), Don Medford’s The Organization with Sidney Poitier, De Palma’s Get to Know Your Rabbit with Tom Smothers, Michael Ritchie’s The Candidate with Robert Redford, and Howard Zieff’s brilliant chase movie Slither, with James Caan and Sally (“Are you packing heat?”) Kellerman. These were made in the 1970s when Garfield was also appearing on TV (Bonanza, McCloud, Ironside, Rhoda, Gunsmoke, etc).

More good films followed with Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation with Gene Hackman, Billy Wilder’s remake of The Front Page, Robert Altman’s Nashville, Sidney J. Furie’s Gable and Lombard, Peter Yates’ Mother, Jugs and Speed, William Friedkin’s The Brink’s Job, Richard Rush’s The Stuntman, Coppola’s One From the Heart, Wim Wenders’ The State of Things and Michael Apted’s Continental Divide. For a while from the late ’70s Garfield reverted to his birth name of Goorwitz. Then in the ‘80s he went back to being Garfield for Irreconcilable Differences with Ryan O’Neal, Teachers with Nick Nolte, Coppola’s The Cotton Club, Beverly Hills Cop II, Quentin Tarantino’s My Best Friend’s Birthday, Warren Beatty’s Dick Tracy, Wenders’ Until the End of the World, Donald Cammell’s Wild Side and Roman Polanski’s The Ninth Gate in 1999 before which he had suffered a stroke. He carried on doing television as well as films until his last features, namely Frank Darabont’s The Majestic with Jim Carrey and John Marino’s White Boy in 2002. He had another stroke in 2004 and retired to live in the Motion Picture Home in Los Angeles.

MICHAEL DARVELL