Paul Dooley plays fathers baffled by their children and fond of them anyway, mostly by underplaying: the flat line, the look at the wall. In Breaking Away he is close to perfect; elsewhere he is often the decent man the film forgets to use.
Fi1m perspective
A customer brings a used car back to the lot and Ray Stoller, who sold it to him, tries to say the word "refund". He cannot. Paul Dooley plays the scene in Breaking Away (1979) as a man in real physical pain, and it is the funniest thing in a very funny film. That is how he works. He does not do anything large; he finds the one word that sticks in a man's throat and stands there with it.
He came to films late. There was stage and stand-up work in New York from the 1950s, and writing for The Electric Company, before Robert Altman saw him on stage in Hold Me and put him in A Wedding (1978). Altman made five films with him, including Popeye (1980), where he plays Wimpy, and let him improvise and play something close to himself. "I picked you to be you," Dooley has said Altman told him. Then Peter Yates cast him as a former stonecutter selling cars in Bloomington, and from that point on he was the father. John Hughes wrote an extra scene to get him into Sixteen Candles (1984). Later came Christopher Guest's mockumentaries, with small odd parts like the UFO abductee in Waiting for Guffman (1996), and the voice of Sarge in Cars (2006) and its sequels, and character work that has carried on into the 2020s.
What he does best is refuse to push. In Breaking Away Ray walks his son through the campus at night and names the stone he cut for each building, and says he was proud of the work and never felt allowed inside. Dooley says it flat, looking at the wall and not at the boy. We were moved more than a comedy about bicycles had any right to manage, and it was that refusal to look at Dennis Christopher that did it. Barbara Barrie, at the kitchen stove, is the other half of the performance, and Yates has the sense to leave the pair of them alone.
The same quietness is a problem when a director has nothing for him to be quiet about. In Steven Soderbergh's The Underneath (1995) he is Ed Dutton, a decent, worried stepfather, and decent and worried is all the film gives him, because it has left its own centre empty. Being the reliable father meant being cast as the reliable father, and the dossier of his career is heavy with men who love their children and get one scene to show it. Guest, to his credit, uses the deadpan for something else entirely.
If you know him only as a gravelly voice in a children's film about talking cars, go back to Bloomington and watch him fail to say refund.
Biography
Paul Dooley is an American character actor. Born Paul Brown on 22 February 1928 in Parkersburg, West Virginia, he graduated from West Virginia University in 1952 with a degree in speech and drama. He served in the US Navy from 1946 to 1948 and began his career on stage, including in the original Broadway production of The Odd Couple, while also working as a comedian and writer.
Dooley is known for film roles including Breaking Away (1979), Popeye (1980), Sixteen Candles (1984) and voicing Sarge in the Cars series (2006–2017). He appeared as Ed Dutton in The Underneath (1995) and has featured in several Christopher Guest mockumentaries. He co-created and served as head writer for the first season of the PBS children's series The Electric Company.
Dooley received a National Board of Review Award for Best Supporting Actor for his performance in Breaking Away.
