Héctor Elizondo is the man who knows how the building works. He plays small parts with a stillness other actors mistake for doing nothing, and the cost of being so good at it is that films stopped asking him for anything else.
Fi1m perspective
Watch what Héctor Elizondo does with a sandwich. In American Gigolo (1980) his Detective Sunday turns up in Julian's flat, eats, and asks where Julian was, and he never raises his voice or hurries the question. He is rumpled and patient and, in a film that keeps the man at its centre a blank, the best company on screen. Ten years later, in Pretty Woman (1990), he is the hotel manager, Barnard Thompson, and he plays him with a kindness that costs nothing and makes the place feel safe. Those two parts are a fair measure of what he does: he arrives in someone else's story, knows where everything is kept, and everyone behaves.
He came out of New York theatre in the 1960s and into film in the early 1970s, and the early work is not all gentle. In The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974) he is Mr Grey, one of the hijackers. Then Garry Marshall cast him in Young Doctors in Love (1982) and kept casting him, 18 films in all, in every film Marshall made. Pretty Woman was the one that got him noticed. Television took most of the rest: Dr Phillip Watters, running the hospital in Chicago Hope from 1994 to 2000, and Ed Alzate, the family friend in Last Man Standing for a decade from 2011.
What he does well is hard to see because it looks like nothing. He does not reach for a line; he waits for it, and he lets the other actor finish. Marshall's advice for Thompson was "Play the guy that you'd like to work for," and that is the whole performance, a man whose authority shows in how little he needs to use it. We will admit the detective got to us more than the manager did. Sunday is the only person in American Gigolo who seems to find Julian interesting rather than useful, and when the film went dead for its last forty minutes we caught ourselves waiting for him to knock again.
The cost is plain. After Pretty Woman the parts narrowed to the benevolent: Runaway Bride (1999), Joe the security chief in The Princess Diaries (2001), the doctors and coaches and head porters. He is good in all of them, and the films needed him more than they let on, but the actor who played Mr Grey was not asked back. That is not his doing. Hollywood found a use for him and used it.
If you want to see what the fuss is about, start with the flat and the sandwiches, not the hotel. The hotel is the one everyone remembers. The detective is the one that shows you what he could have been doing all along.
Biography
Héctor Elizondo is an American character actor. Born in New York City on 22 December 1936, he began his career in theatre and won an Obie Award for his performance in the off-Broadway play Steambath.
Elizondo has appeared in more than eighty films. His roles include the hotel manager in Pretty Woman (1990), Joe in The Princess Diaries (2001) and its 2004 sequel, and supporting parts in several films directed by Garry Marshall. On television he played Dr Phillip Watters in Chicago Hope (1994–2000), for which he won a Primetime Emmy Award, and Ed Alzate in Last Man Standing (2011–2021).
