Michael Elphick

Michael Elphick's face arrives before he does. A heavy man, a Sussex growl worn down to a croak, and a lip that has started to curl before the other actor has finished the line. Directors saw it at once and cast him accordingly: from 1969 he was the menace in the corner of British films and television, the policeman, the thug, the man blocking a doorway. He did it well enough that for a decade it was nearly all he was asked to do.

The 1970s were the typecasting years, Cockney heavies and hard men, and then the parts got better without the man getting any prettier. He was the father in Quadrophenia (1979) and the bully in Blue Remembered Hills (1979). In The Elephant Man (1980) he is the Night Porter, one of the small, unlovely parts that film needs if its kindness is to mean anything, and he does not decorate it. Gorky Park (1983) gave him Pasha. Then Lars von Trier, making his first feature, gave him a lead.

The Element of Crime (1984) is not a film we rate highly; the investigation struggles to make its next question interesting and the dialogue tests patience. Elphick is the reason it can be watched. As Fisher, the detective retracing a serial killer through a Europe that never stops raining, he is battered and unglamorous and never once announces how unpleasant the surroundings are. We were grateful to him, frankly, in a way we are seldom grateful to an actor: an hour into all that sepia and dripping water, his tired, unhurried bulk was the one thing on screen behaving like a person, and we held on to it. He does not make the case matter. Nobody could. He makes the man matter, which is different and, here, enough.

Then Withnail & I (1987), and Jake the poacher, and the discovery that the sneer was funny. Bruce Robinson's film is sharply written and unexpectedly sad, and Elphick has only a handful of scenes, but the threat he brings into that cottage is the real thing, and the comedy comes from watching two soft young men fail to cope with it. It is the same instrument played droll instead of dangerous. That in the same period he became Ken Boon, and stayed him from 1986 to 1992 and again in 1995, tells you where the country wanted him. Television gave him the lead that cinema never quite trusted him with, and his film career never caught up.

He said of himself, "I've always been a terrible hedonist. I get bored very easily." The performances do not show it. What they show is a man handed the same part, more or less, for three decades, who kept finding one more thing to do with a look. Go to Withnail & I for the pleasure and to The Element of Crime for the proof.