By JON BURLINGAME
"All great actors are really character actors."
Orson Welles

Remember when an entertaining bit by a great character actor used to save an otherwise lousy movie? Harry Dean Stanton or M. Emmet Walsh could turn up, make something diverting out of a mundane script, and all of a sudden the two hours didn't seem quite so wasted.

Movies have certainly changed since the days of Hollywood golden agers Patsy Kelly and Everett Sloane. Nowadays, most actors don't want to be labeled "character" actors. To some, the phrase seems pejorative, suggesting a limited range, a tendency to play the same type again and again, or an inability to break out of the pack and reach A-level status. (Indeed, some actors contacted for this story did not want to participate for those reasons.)

"The term as we know it, and most film buffs use it, refers to supporting players, who tend to play a more colorful range of characters than the leading man or woman," film historian Leonard Maltin says.

He cites the classic "Casablanca" as the ultimate character-actor movie. "Every single person who speaks in that film is colorful and interesting. That's very rare nowadays."

The studio system that created movies like "Casablanca," and kept all those supporting players under contract, is kaput. But those kinds of actors do exist. The best of today's supporting actors help to make contemporary films better. Especially when the movies themselves are, shall we say, less than they ought to be.

"There used to be the leading man, leading woman and the juveniles. The character actors were all the other people: the mother, the father, the uncle, the crook and so forth," says veteran acting coach Jeff Corey, whose character turns have spiced up movies from "The Killers" (1946) to "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" (1969).

Corey, 87, has taught hundreds of actors, from James Dean and Jack Nicholson to Jane Fonda and Barbra Streisand. He cites a historical basis for the concept of character acting. "Shakespeare and the Elizabethan playwrights believed in the humors of the human body--some people are phlegmatic, bilious and so forth. In 'Julius Caesar,' Brutus was a sanguine man, but Cassius was splenetic."

Directors dating back to D.W. Griffith often depended on the same stable of actors again and again, sometimes playing similar parts. Ward Bond, Harry Carey Jr., Ben Johnson, Jane Darwell and others show up regularly in John Ford westerns.

Ditto William Demarest, Franklin Pangborn and Jimmy Conlin in Preston Sturges comedies. Maltin also cites the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers dance films of the '30s as an example. "People went to see them for Fred and Ginger," he concedes, "but those films were built on the shoulders of great comedy character actors: Edward Everett Horton, Erik Rhodes, Victor Moore, Helen Broderick."

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences created categories for supporting actor and actress Oscars in 1936. "By the middle '30s," says film critic and author David Thomson, "it was quite clear that there was something in the nature of Hollywood storytelling that [required] the supporting actor. People were being cast to do again what they had done before: the crusty old teacher, the senior editor to the young newspaper reporter.... It's very much a notion that the world is made up of stories about heroes who are surrounded by tent poles, lesser characters."

So how do you define "character actor" in today's very different moviemaking environment? There's the quirky, always interesting fellow (Steve Buscemi, Jim Broadbent, Billy Bob Thornton, Philip Seymour Hoffman); the nut case (James Woods, Christopher Walken, Bruce Dern, Dennis Hopper); the aging star (Maggie Smith, James Coburn, Lauren Bacall); the girlfriend/confidante (Joan Cusack, Janeane Garofalo, Rosie O'Donnell); and so forth.

"Part of what you get when you hire Steve Buscemi or Christopher Walken or Joe Pantoliano or M. Emmet Walsh is the baggage they bring with them," Maltin says. "They're not necessarily similar characters, but we anticipate them doing something interesting. Just as the audience [in the '30s and '40s] must have felt when they saw Eugene Pallette or Allen Jenkins or Frank McHugh."

"Christopher Lloyd, Geoffrey Lewis, Harvey Keitel, Rip Torn, Gene Hackman, Seymour Cassel--these are men who don't necessarily get the girl, so we refer to them as character men," says casting director Mike Fenton, who helped to assemble the casts of "Chinatown," "Shampoo," "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" and "Raiders of the Lost Ark."

He says American attitudes differ from those of the British. Judi Dench shifts effortlessly from a brief bit in "Shakespeare in Love" to the demanding title role in "Iris." "I think that Helen Mirren can star in a film as a leading lady, or she can play Aunt Tillie," Fenton says. "It doesn't matter."

Thomson agrees: "There's a tradition in British repertory theater where you would engage a star, and in a season he might play a couple of very big parts, but he also might play a couple of very small parts.

"That feeling of versatility and dedication to the group enterprise is very important to the supporting actor," Thomson continues, "because he or she knows that they're not dominant. But they know they're valuable, and they have to be content with that, with a very much reduced level of pay."

Meanwhile, "the industry is almost driving character actors out of existence," Maltin contends. "What happens is, when someone gets some notice, some real attention, their salary goes up."

But with major stars now demanding $10 million to $20 million for the lead roles, there's little money left for supporting actors.

Maltin cites a recent case in which a veteran character actor was approached about a big-budget film and told that the deal was $3,000 a week, "take it or leave it," because of a deal with the entire supporting cast. He took it, because he wanted the work, even though it was far below his usual asking price.

Thomson's favorites--the Thelma Ritters, Agnes Mooreheads and Akim Tamiroffs--aren't around anymore. But neither, for the most part, is the need for a character "type" to play endless variations on a single theme. Today's supporting actors are expected to be trained, smart and versatile.

Adds Fenton: "Not everybody can star in the movie. The rest of the people are the characters supporting the stars. They may be leading people in type, but they are the character actors. They are the people who make the movie work."

Some of the industry's best supporting players are appearing in this year's summer movies:
 

Tony Shalhoub

Many observers felt that Shalhoub should have been nominated for an Oscar for his role in last year's Coen brothers' film, "The Man Who Wasn't There." As big-city lawyer Freddy Riedenschneider, who shows up to represent accused murderer Frances McDormand, he energized the movie.

"Every once in a while you get lucky, like with the Coen brothers," Shalhoub says. "That happened to be a period, the 1940s, that fits me very well." ("Man" was set in 1949; his earlier Coen brothers film, "Barton Fink," was also set in the '40s.) Shalhoub, 48, has been lucky a lot, especially in the past five years.

He enjoyed a brief role in the 1997 sci-fi comedy "Men in Black" as Jeebs, an alien weapons dealer. He reprises that role in this summer's sequel, although, Shalhoub says, "he looks somewhat different because he's degenerated even more, having had his head blown off several times between movies."

Since playing Antonio, the Italian cab driver on the long-running series "Wings," he has won attention as an uncompromising chef in Stanley Tucci's "Big Night" (1996), the strangely non-Asian crewman Fred Kwan in "Galaxy Quest" (1999) and a street prophet in the current Angelina Jolie film "Life or Something Like It."

Shalhoub returns to TV this summer in the title role of the USA series "Monk," about an ex-police detective who suffers from obsessive-compulsive disorder. "I wanted to have a series with a part that was really odd and challenging, and this affords me that," he says, "because the guy is so messed up."