Anthony Heald

Dr Frederick Chilton runs the hospital that holds Hannibal Lecter, and in The Silence of the Lambs (1991) Anthony Heald plays him as a man who has mistaken the keys for the authority. He patronises Clarice Starling and expects to be admired for it. Heald does not have much screen time. He fills it with small shows of superiority that never quite cover the fear underneath, the fear of a man who knows someone cleverer is in the building and that everybody else knows it too. We disliked him inside a minute, and it took longer to notice how carefully Heald had arranged that: the polish on top, the insecurity showing through, so the dislike feels like our own discovery rather than the film's instruction.

He came to films late. Heald spent years in regional repertory theatre and taught acting in Lansing, Michigan, before moving to New York in his mid-thirties, with an Off-Broadway debut in 1980 and a Broadway debut in 1982. His first film was Silkwood (1983). The reputation was made on stage, in Anything Goes and in a Terrence McNally play, and later with the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, where he has played Shylock. He has put it plainly himself: the career has been nearly all theatre, with film a small share, and he would like the balance to shift, though not all the way. We cannot send you to a stage performance, which is the difficulty with writing about him at all.

Chilton did what breakthroughs often do, which is narrow the offers. Through the nineties he was the lawyer or the official, Marty Velmano in The Pelican Brief (1993) among three Grisham adaptations, the man in the suit the hero is right not to trust. He has said he had mostly played lovable nerds before Chilton and wanted to try someone less sympathetic. He got his wish, repeatedly. Television was kinder. David E. Kelley kept finding him judges in The Practice and Boston Legal, and gave him four seasons as Scott Guber, the vice-principal in Boston Public (2000–2004), a prig with enough time to turn into a person. He went back to Chilton for Red Dragon (2002).

What he does well is detail: the voice, the carriage, the small vanities, worked out in advance so that on screen he can be quick and economical. He has said the thing he most likes to hear is that he is different from role to role, and the screen has rarely asked him to prove it. If you want to see what the theatre has been seeing for forty years, there is one film we can point you to with confidence, under Jonathan Demme, and he is in it for a few minutes, being insufferable with great care.