Two directors have helped propel Walken to his current status: Abel Ferrara and Quentin Tarantino. Ferrara may be the most influential of the pair in this regard. His direction of Walken as mobster Frank White in "King of New York" (1990) was key to giving the actor a sort of underground cachet. White is a modern-day Robin Hood/drug lord battling the cops and rival gangsters in '80s Manhattan, and though he's as melanin-deprived as his name suggests, he also possesses the qualities of what Norman Mailer called the "white Negro": That is, he retains the menace and hip of the streets while having the savoir-faire to sip champagne with the elite.

"King of New York" introduced Walken to a generation for the most part unfamiliar with his work in "The Deer Hunter." Walken's other roles with Ferrara helped solidify his standing as a one-of-a-kind presence. In "The Addiction" (1995) Walken plays an expert, Baudelaire-spouting vampire who teaches novice Lili Taylor a thing or two about the bloodsucking game. In "The Funeral" (1996) he plays the eldest of three Mafia brothers bound to one another by honor and madness. And in the futuristic "New Rose Hotel" (1998) he's a tap-dancing con artist who likes to shout "Coleslaw for everybody" in mid-debauch.

Walken's Tarantino-inspired work further ingrained his image in the minds of a generation unfamiliar with his earlier roles. Walken had only small parts in "True Romance" (1993), directed by Tony Scott with a Tarantino screenplay, and "Pulp Fiction" (1994), directed and co-written by Tarantino, but both films were influential in the '90s, and Walken's lines in each would become the source of endless fascination.

Walken's more cartoonish collaborations with Tim Burton in "Batman Returns" (1992) and more recently in "Sleepy Hollow" (1999) took Walken's self-caricature to the nth degree, though his work with Burton hasn't had the impact on his career that the Tarantino and Ferrara films have. In "Batman Returns," he is thoroughly loathsome as the megalomaniacal scourge of Gotham, Maximillian "Max" Shreck. And he's perfectly monstrous as the pre-headless Hessian Horseman in "Sleepy Hollow." The roles are novel (which, of course, isn't novel for Walken) but dead-ends as far as challenging the actor. In fact, the Hessian Horseman never speaks in "Sleepy Hollow," he just growls. "Batman Returns" was more of a hit for Burton and required a little more from Walken, but neither part came close to the roles Walken inhabits for Ferrara or Tarantino.

Other Walken roles have added icing to the cake baked by Ferrara, Tarantino and Burton. There has been Walken as mysterious seducer in Paul Schrader's "The Comfort of Strangers" (1991), as Mike Myers' rival in "Wayne's World 2" (1993) and as archangel Gabriel in "The Prophecy" (1995). Walken seems firmly cemented in our collective moviegoing consciousness as a cooler-than-thou, outri figure who might have been plucked whole from some modernist European novel.

Of late Walken has expressed the desire to play some "normal" parts, where he doesn't blow anyone away or drink anyone's blood. And in the recently released "The Opportunists," he comes pretty close by portraying an ex-con safecracker trying to do right by his family and his girlfriend, played by Cyndi Lauper. Walken does nice work, but his role lacks the intensity of his villains and nut cases. It's not so much that he's typecast as it is that those walks on the dark side of the moon are intrinsically more interesting than anything the "nice guy" characters might do.

"What you are as an actor is a reflection of what you are in real life," Walken told Interview in 1993. "And in a way, everything you do in your life is information for your acting. But the truth is that my life is alarmingly predictable. I'm a very conservative citizen. I've been married for 25 years. I have two houses, a station wagon and cats. I pay for all my bills, and people trust me. I was here for this interview right on time."

Despite Walken's protests that he's just a regular Joe, there's a depth to him that's undeniable. In a 1998 Mr. Showbiz interview, Walken explained his meticulous process of preparation: how he covers his script in notes; how he has "six subtexts" for anything he says, even "pass the salt"; and so on. Walken's description is revealing. Because if he explores six subtexts for saying something so slight, what must he do to prepare for roles like those in "The Addiction" or "True Romance"? To plumb the darkness for the multiple layers of a vampire or a psychotic, and to do so effectively, if one's to judge by the end result, suggests a certain profundity and perhaps a predilection for journeying through mental strata most of us leave unexamined.

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