"What Is It With You Blondes?": Deceased Artiste Val Avery

Val Avery was not a handsome man, but he was one hell of a character actor. Avery died at 85 this week, and I’m sure his grizzled visage will be impressing movie watchers for years and years to come.

He was of Armenian extraction (real name: Sebouh Der Abrahamian), served in WWII, and was in over 100 movies and 300 television shows. He had several prominent character parts in everything from Hud to Donnie Brasco, but I will always remember him for his powerful scene-stealing bits in Cassavetes’ films. He worked with him in five episodes of Johnny Staccato, and then had featured parts in five of the features JC directed. I already mentioned this in a previous blog entry about character actors, but I treasure Avery’s scene in Minnie and Moskowitz (1972) as the blind date from hell. It is a case study in how to steal a movie in less than four minutes:

All hail the character actor

He’s never going to be a romantic lead, and he’s never even going to be the central villain in an action film. The character actor (and actress) is of course the unsung hero of the movie biz and is also the backbone of many a great crime picture (or Western or sci-fi movie or comedy or drama). I was pleased to see a thematic tribute on YouTube to the character actors of old posted by a gentleman in Switzerland. What he has done is isolate their segments and underscore them with fades to black. This may seem odd and disjunctive (“isn’t something missing?”). But it serves to illustrate how they enter a movie, do their bit, and occasionally steal the show. He includes the likely suspects including Mike Mazurki and Lionel Stander, but the posts are most interesting when he finds clips where the person is dominating the action, as this bit of Oscar Homolka from Hitchock’s Sabotage



Here Max Showalter, the grotesque, guffawing dad from Lord Love a Duck is used to sentimental effect in How to Murder Your Wife


The immortal Elisha Cook, Jr., puts the menace on a “glamour girl” in the noir Born to Kill:
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And the all-purpose ethnic guy who made such an impression in Orson Welles’ movies, Akim Tamiroff. Here he’s seen with Funhouse god Peter Ustinov (a pretty strong character person himself) in Topkapi.



The poster also goes to somewhat more recent character performers like the great Val Avery. His clip (from the completely forgotten Russian Roulette) is an interesting one, but I would have to direct you to this bit from Cassavetes’ nearly perfect rough-edged romantic comedy Minnie and Moskowitz wherein Avery completely dominates the proceedings and can never be forgotten: