Fred Thompson

Watch him in a control room. He is a head taller than everyone else, he speaks last, and he speaks slowly, in a Southern baritone that sounds as though it has already reached the decision the others are still arguing about. That is the whole performance, and it kept him in work for thirty years.

He did not train for it. His first screen part, in Marie (1985), was himself, the lawyer he had actually been in the Tennessee case the film dramatises, and Roger Donaldson, who directed it, used him again as a CIA director in No Way Out (1987). Directors had noticed that he was believable as a man with power and kept hiring him to have it. In 1990 alone he was Rear Admiral Painter in The Hunt for Red October, Trudeau in the Die Hard 2 control tower and Big John, the president of the sport, in Days of Thunder. Cape Fear (1991) and In the Line of Fire (1993), the latter as a White House chief of staff, followed. Then he left the screen for the best part of a decade and came back in 2002 as District Attorney Arthur Branch on Law & Order, a part he kept until 2007.

Our own reviews of Die Hard 2 and Days of Thunder do not mention him, and that is not an oversight. The parts are furniture: a man in a tower saying the situation is in hand, a man in a suit saying what the rules are. We liked having him in that tower all the same, because when Trudeau said something was being dealt with we believed it for exactly as long as the scene needed, which is more than the film's villain ever managed. But nobody goes home talking about him, and he seems to have known it. The criticism that follows him about, that he played the same steady official in every film and himself in most of them, is fair as far as it goes.

He once described acting as "the knack of being natural in unnatural circumstances", and that is a working definition of what he did. Around explosions and in front of cameras he behaved like a man who had spent his mornings in offices where real decisions were taken, which he had. Television suited that better than cinema. A district attorney is a boss, someone who turns up, weighs in and goes back to his desk, and Thompson did that on Law & Order for five years without once seeming to work at it.

If you want to see what he did, do not go looking for a Fred Thompson film; there is not one. Put on any of the 1990 pictures and wait for the tall man to speak. He will be right, and then the scene will move on without him, which was the job.