Anthony James had a face cinematographers could not leave alone, and from 1967 to 1992 he was the man behind the counter, the outlaw on the road, the one you did not want to see coming. Rarely given much to do; never wasted it.
Fi1m perspective
Ralph is behind the counter of the diner in Norman Jewison's In the Heat of the Night (1967), and Wexler lights his face like a lamp. It is a long face on top of a body six and a half feet tall, and the light makes it look like something left on in an empty room. Ralph is a racist and the film does not pretend otherwise. We found we could not stop watching him, which is odd, because the script gives him almost nothing; what unsettled us was the stillness, a man behind a counter who looks as though he is waiting for something the rest of the town has not noticed yet.
It was his first major film role, and it fixed him. For the next twenty-five years James was hired to be the man you did not want to meet: outlaws, stalkers, the threatening figure at the edge of the frame, in dozens of guest parts across the Westerns and crime dramas of the 1970s and 1980s. He was Cole Carlin in High Plains Drifter (1973). He was the chauffeur in Burnt Offerings (1976), a part horror audiences have kept alive for him. And he closed the account as Skinny Dubois in Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven (1992), his last screen role, after which he stopped.
The complaint about him is fair as far as it goes: the debut typecast him, and the industry never asked him to be anything but hateful. But there is a difference between an actor who can only do one thing and an actor who is only asked to do one thing, and the evidence for the second is The Naked Gun 2½: The Smell of Fear (1991), where he plays Hector Savage and sends up the whole gallery of men he had spent two decades playing straight. He knew exactly what he looked like. "I never considered myself a celebrity," he said, "just a sometime recognizable face."
We have reviewed only the one film, and it is the one to start with: a counterman in a story about two other men, lit so that you remember him for the rest of the picture. After that, the Eastwoods, where the height and the face were put to the use they were built for. James stopped in 1992 and did not come back, so the filmography is short and there is no late, sad stretch to skip.
Biography
Anthony James was an American character actor born James Anthony on 22 July 1942 in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. He specialised in villainous roles, particularly in Westerns and crime dramas, appearing in numerous films and television series from the 1960s to the early 1990s.
His first major screen role was as Ralph in In the Heat of the Night (1967). Other credits include High Plains Drifter (1973), Blue Thunder (1983), The Naked Gun 2½: The Smell of Fear (1991) and guest appearances in series such as Star Trek: The Next Generation, The A-Team and Knight Rider. His final film role was as Skinny Dubois in Unforgiven (1992).
After retiring from acting, James pursued painting and published books including a memoir, Acting My Face (2014). He died on 26 May 2020 in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
