Walsh did seem to be a man with a cosmology; one that didn't outwardly appear to comfort him much, but perhaps informed some of his many sensitive takes on paranoia and other assorted horrors: "I personally don't believe in aliens," he told Banks. "But, I do believe that there is something out there that is accountable for all these mysterious things that are going on: I think it is a spiritual thing, not a material thing ... These phenomena that most people account for as alien, I can account for in terms of 'The Exorcist.'"

Walsh appeared in more than 50 films and a bunch of sci-fi TV before his untimely departure. Among his first handful of bit parts was the complicated role of the salesman mark who turns out to be a cop who turns out to be a con man in "House of Games" (1987) -- David Mamet's painfully acted and outrageously unnatural to the ear but psychologically irresistible con-man thriller. Walsh is the only actor in the film who seems to have been able to resist Mamet's "deliver your lines like you are teaching English as a second language on audiotape for the hard of hearing" direction and to speak with any immediacy or authenticity. He's great, especially in his sweaty first scenes -- a salesman who finds a briefcase full of money, facing his own moral weakness, his loathing for his own greed -- a weak man slithering into the posture of a beast.

Then there was "Good Morning Vietnam" (1987), in which Walsh plays Sgt. Maj. "Dick" Dickerson, a humorless, evil bastard who is such a zealot that he hates all human life and embraces only protocol. This role was pretty dumb, an obvious, two-dimensional villain to pit against the plucky, innocent, nimble-tonsiled Robin Williams. It's not that the lines were bad; he actually gets some pretty good ones: "If you toy with me, I'll burn you so bad, you'll wish you'd died as a child." (There's something so chillingly antiseptic about this threat -- it's all the more dangerous, satanic and awful for the fact that it contains no profanity.) But Dickerson is so wholly unredeemable, it would be very difficult to make him breathe. Walsh kick-starts the role by delivering some deep and genuine hatred; he made the monster live by giving it a dismal, intolerant brain. His eyes are ringed black with the insomnia of a tortured conscience. Walsh found a wretch to inhabit in a way that was chillingly plausible -- a lesser actor would have just hacked or hammed it up and directed all the character's aggression outward, at Robin Williams -- Walsh knew that someone that abusive to others was certainly most abusive to himself.

"Tequila Sunrise" (1988) is, I think, a chick-flick disguised as a guy flick. Kind of the drag king of chick flicks. It's kind of a "Tango and Cash" affair, with a lot of squalling, David Sanborn, dry-ice 1980s neon saxophones, and Kurt Russell with hair that looks molded out of Brut-flavored Jell-O playing a big L.A. cop loving, protecting, chasing Mel Gibson, a big L.A. drug dealer. Walsh plays agent Hal Maguire of the DEA, a wimpy fed in a gray suit and wiretap earpiece, a cop so zealous that he hates all human life and embraces only protocol. He really wants to nail Mel, even though Mel has "retired" as a drug dealer and now drives a forklift. Tough-ass Russell forbids Walsh to arrest Mel because he and Mel are old high school buddies, hence, dramatic conflict.

It's funny to see Walsh across a table from Russell, letting Kurt Russell out-heavy him -- sort of like watching a particularly nice German Shepherd roll over and take it while a 2-year-old baby beats it around the ears with a plastic phone. That, to me, is a real hallmark of acting chops: Walsh could turn off his gravity when he felt like it, something his cohorts like Nicholson never really bothered to learn how to do. Most heavy guys always come off like the big dog, even when they are supposed to be playing the smaller dog.

Walsh played journalist-biographer Bob Woodward in the John Belushi biopic "Wired" (1989), a very serious contender for the title of Worst Movie Ever Made. Really, really, really, unwatchably bad, like, rip the video from the VCR and pull out and hit each square inch of the tape with a hammer for its own good -- that kind of bad. Exposition never felt so much like a poke in the eye. Walsh has nearly nothing to work with as Woodward, an unfunny reporter trying write an unfunny bio about a funnyman's life. He is supposed to be investigating Belushi's wife's tooth-grindingly dumb idea that Belushi's death was suspicious because "John hated needles."

"I can't believe it! I've always wanted to meet that guy! Hey! Bob Woodward! Wow!" barks Michael Chiklis as the disembodied spirit of John Belushi, pointing out Woodward as he drives around earth in a taxi with Ray Sharkey, his absurd Al Pacino in Scarface Latino stereotype guardian angel, "Angel."

"He's jour biographer."

"My biographer? Bob Woodward? I'll go down in history!"

"He gonna do for jou what he did for Nixon. He gonna call it 'Wired.' He gonna trash your name from here to..."

"I'm fucked."

But not so fucked as Woodward, at least at the hands of this screenplay (based on Woodward's own book).

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