John Schuck

Look for him at the back. In the Robert Altman films of the early 1970s, where everyone talks at once and nobody waits for a cue, John Schuck is the large man who takes a beat longer than the others to catch up, and whose face shows the beat. He has been cast that way ever since, as the slow one, the bumbling one, the sergeant who has not quite followed, in drama and comedy alike, and he has said that he prefers it to playing the lead.

Altman found him at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco and put him in MASH (1970) as Painless Pole, a debut that also gave a major studio picture its first use of a word we will not print. Three more Altman films followed, among them McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971), where he plays Smalley, and Thieves Like Us* (1974), where his Chicamaw is the film performance most often named as his best. We have reviewed only the first, and our review does not mention him, which is not a slight. Altman built that town out of faces you half recognise and lines you half hear, and Schuck's is one of them. We went back to look for him and felt a small, disproportionate pleasure when we found him, the way you do spotting a neighbour in a crowd scene; in a film where even the leads are half swallowed by the weather and the overlapping talk, being part of the furniture is the job.

Television took him for most of the 1970s, six seasons as Sgt Charles Enright opposite Rock Hudson in McMillan & Wife (1971-77). After that the parts got heavier, in the literal sense. He played Herman Munster in The Munsters Today (1988-91) under a great deal of prosthetic, and from Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986) onwards he was a Klingon more than once, beginning as the Klingon Ambassador. He liked it for the reason a stage actor would. "Well, this is very Shakespearean. I like this. Big character. Wonderful language."

What he does well is keep the timing and the voice intact when the make-up has taken the face away; the joke still arrives when it should, and the man under the latex is still recognisably a man. The one criticism anyone bothers to make is that he was typecast in supporting and costumed parts, which is true and does not appear to have cost him a night's sleep. He has kept up the stage work, returning repeatedly to Daddy Warbucks in Annie, and has gone on taking screen roles into the 2020s.

He is the kind of actor a page like this exists for: you have seen him, you did not know his name, and the name will now attach itself to a dozen faces. Start with the Altman films, where he is hardest to find, and count that as the compliment.