Tuesday, May 13, 2008
So you never knew his name. But surely you remember the face of J.T. Walsh, whose angry, cowardly, inwardly wrecked characters scowled their way into our collective memory.
Aug 26, 2004 | You'd know him if you saw him.
He looked a little like James Spader, if Spader looked as though he had about 17 years' more bourbon, divorces and weird secrets in him. He was a little like William Hurt, if William Hurt had been through 'Nam or something equally character crushing that slapped that smug WASP entitlement off him.
The intrinsic weight of J.T. Walsh was greater than the sum of his roles -- he was a heavy, and not just in kilos -- an actor who could convey the kind of baritone-black moods that shook the ground like a Panzer with funk in the trunk and who could just as easily refuse to take himself seriously. His hair-raising scariness, when he felt like it, was the same machete edge that made his comic timing so deadly. Maybe he had a prescient sense that he wasn't going to live very long; maybe this gave him a kind of desperate need to be extra, 200 percent, alive and make all his better selves and demons wrestle right on the surface of his eyeballs when he was on-screen.
Jack Nicholson made a point of memorializing his friend J.T. at the Oscars, after Walsh died of a heart attack in 1998 -- one imagines that the two of them hosed a lot of blow and looked up Catholic schoolgirls' skirts together, but who knows? J.T. Walsh was a real enigma; the tapestry of intricate nastiness he projected in so many roles could have just been great acting. He might not have been a completely happy man, but as an actor, he was totally, piercingly effective. He may never have had a leading role, but he had, and still has, a devoted cult following and a truly impressive number of online memorials (here and here, for starters). He might be dead, but for a certain stratum of decadent, quality-dinge-loving cinéastes, J.T. Walsh is still in charge.
James Patrick Walsh ("J.T.," according to an obituary by Jim Emerson, was a typo that Walsh took and ran with) was born Sept. 28, 1943. He abandoned a series of half-hearted career efforts -- restaurant managing, journalism, social work, teaching -- before deciding to be a serious actor at the age of 30. He scored his first film role at 40.
Stuart Banks quotes Walsh in a Bubblegun interview about his childhood, where his father was a military man serving in Germany:
"I was surrounded by these guys who were spies right after World War II, when they were paranoid at the Russians ... I had school friends whose fathers I would see arrive home in uniform, and leave the next day in civilian clothes, and disappear for a month. Sometimes they would come home, and sometimes not..."
I asked the actor Richard Edson, who was also in "Good Morning Vietnam," if he'd known Walsh, and he sent this great character-sketch of an e-mail:
"Yeah, I knew J.T. Nice guy, a little strange. Started late, you know, acting. Was a school teacher, I think. He told me the story ... Something like always wanting to act but never having the nerve to take it seriously, then getting too depressed teaching, going nowhere, just giving it all up and taking the plunge. He was good company, not your typical self-absorbed actor type. Serious, somewhat preoccupied, and full of anger that he seemed to direct mostly at himself. He drank and smoked a lot. Also loved to eat. He got really big and seemingly unhealthy before he died. Heart attack, right? He was kind of young, no?
"He fell in love with a Thai princess in Bangkok. Well, I don't know if it was a real princess, but she was an aristocrat, that's for sure. He was trying to buy gems -- rubies and emeralds -- as a business/investment opportunity in Thailand, and had met her as someone who could help him. Rich Thai women are very proper, and he began spending a lot of time with her. I met her once and she was very beautiful but tight and proper and refined in that rich (Asian?) way. He'd tell me he was falling in love with her but that he was uncertain about her feelings towards him. It seemed like he was spending all his free time with her. He was so smitten and hopeful that I felt like I was witnessing this touching little love story being played out in front of my eyes, but, alas, nothing happened.
"I ran into him a couple of times after that here in L.A. Always sweet, smiling, but you could always sense something else going on, some preoccupation, something brewing inside. And he was always getting bigger and never without a cigarette. One after the other."
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