By Erin Free
“The measure of success for me isn’t whether I’ll be on the cover of TV Guide or at the top of the marquee,” Allen Garfield told The LA Times in 1986. “If you go into something just for the special attention, it’s going to wear thin.” Allen Garfield rarely received the special attention that he deserved because he was a true character actor: never front and centre, and always away to the side making other people look good. At the age of 80, Garfield has passed away, one of so many tragic victims of COVID-19 (73-year-old singer/songwriter John Prine and 64-year-old music producer Hal Willner have also succumbed recently), and another sad facet of this horrendous global calamity. “RIP Allen Garfield,” wrote veteran actress Ronee Blakely on Twitter. “The great actor who played my husband in Nashville, has died today of COVID, and I hang my head in tears.”
A twitchy, sweaty on-screen presence who made nervousness an art form, Garfield’s list of credits is long and impressive, with many of Hollywood’s greatest directors finding just the right place for his unconventional brand of energy. Appropriately enough, he kicked off his decades-spanning career with roles in three counterculture classics – Greetings (1968), Putney Swope (1968) and Hi, Mom! (1970) – and went on to feature in a host of key against-the-grain 1970s works, including Milos Forman’s Taking Off (1971), John G. Avildsen’s Cry Uncle (1971), Brian De Palma’s Get To Know Your Rabbit (1972; his third film for the director after Greetings and Hi, Mom!), Michael Ritchie’s The Candidate (1972) and Robert Altman’s aforementioned sprawling masterpiece Nashville (1975). He was also a favourite of Francis Ford Coppola (appearing in 1974’s The Conversation, 1981’s One From The Heart, 1984’s The Cotton Club), and was a regular player on TV sitcoms and episodic drama.
Garfield suffered a stroke as he was set to appear in Roman Polanski’s The Ninth Gate (1999), and was then hit by another one in 2004, which effectively ended his acting career. A hard-working theatre performer before making his big screen bow, Garfield was also an amateur boxer, a sports journalist, and a member of the era-defining Actors Studio in New York. When creating his extraordinary rogue’s gallery of shady, scuzzy, shifty, funny and always original crooks, con-men, hucksters and blow-hards, Allen Garfield could always excavate the truth, and go right to the heart of the matter. “At a gut level, I still consider myself a journalist, because a good actor is merely reporting on the truth of a given situation,” Garfield told The LA Times in 1986. “You just try to take the part and invest it with the maximum of your imagination and resources.”
It was something that he did every time…
