Elisha Cook Jr.
Character actor Elisha Cook, Jr. (born December 26, 1903 in San Francisco, California, USA, died May 18, 1995 in Big Pine, California) made a career playing cowardly villains and neurotics, earning the nickname "Hollywood's lightest heavy." Cook started out in vaudeville and then became a Broadway actor. In 1936 he settled in Hollywood and, after playing a series of college-aged parts, began a long stint playing weaklings or sadistic loser-hoods. In Universal's Phantom Lady, he portrays a slimy, intoxicated nightclub-orchestra drummer. Other notable roles include Wilmer the gunsel in The Maltese Falcon (1941), "pug ugly" Marty Waterman in Born to Kill, Harry Jones in The Big Sleep (1946), Torrey in Shane (1953), and George Peatty, the hen-pecked husband to Marie Windsor, in Stanley Kubrick's The Killing (1956).
His acting career spanned over sixty years. In the above roles and others, Cook's characters usually ended up being killed off (strangled, poisoned or shot); he was arguably Hollywood's most notable fall guy for many years.
Cook played a private detective in a 1953 episode of Adventures of Superman TV series entitled Semi-Private Eye. In the series DVD commentary, Jack Larson describes this as his favorite episode, both for being allowed to play a self-styled Humphrey Bogart-style Shamus, and for the chance to work with "Cookie", who became a good friend.
He played lawyer Samuel T. Cogley on in the Star Trek episode "Court Martial", and later had a long-term recurring role as Icepick on Magnum, P.I..
It's been said that Cook has been directed by more successful directors than any other actor:
- 1982: Wim Wenders (Hammett)
- 1979: Steven Spielberg (1941)
- 1979: Tobe Hooper (Salem's Lot)
- 1979: Franco Zeffirelli (The Champ)
- 1976: J. Lee Thompson (St. Ives)
- 1973: Robert Aldrich (Emperor of the North Pole)
- 1973: Sam Peckinpah (Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid)
- 1973: James William Guercio's only direction (Electra Glide in Blue)
- 1968: Roman Polanski (Rosemary's Baby)
- 1966: Richard Donner ("The Wild, Wild West" episode "Bars of Hell")
- 1963: Roger Corman (The Haunted Palace)
- 1961: Marlon Brando's only direction (One-Eyed Jacks)
- 1960: John Cassavetes ("Johnny Staccato" episode "Solomon")
- 1959: William Castle (House on Haunted Hill)
- 1957: Don Siegel (Baby Face Nelson)
- 1956: Stanley Kubrick (The Killing)
- 1953: George Stevens (Shane)
- 1947: Robert Wise (Born to Kill)
- 1946: Howard Hawks (The Big Sleep)
- 1946: Busby Berkeley (Cinderella Jones)
- 1941: John Huston (The Maltese Falcon)
- 1938: John Ford (Submarine Patrol)
- 1937: Otto Preminger (Danger-Love at Work)
- 1937: Mervyn LeRoy (They Won't Forget)