Regis Toomey spent half a century being the policeman who walks in halfway through the scene, says what needs saying and leaves. He was seldom the point of a film, and he made that a job worth doing.
Fi1m perspective
Think of a man in a hat, standing slightly to one side of the star, who knows the neighbourhood better than the star does. That is Regis Toomey in most of the films he made: policemen, detectives, men who carry a badge or ought to. He learned early what the job would ask of him. His first film, Alibi (1929), cast him as Danny McGann, an undercover homicide cop who got friendly with the crooks and was shot for it, and he later said it was the first of a long series of death scenes. As the parts got smaller, the deaths got shorter.
He had come from the stage in Pittsburgh and New York, where he sang until laryngitis on a European tour took the voice away and left him the acting. The leading-man years in pictures were brief. By the middle of the 1930s he had settled into character work, and the credits that followed are the ones people still watch: Sanders in His Girl Friday (1940), Bert Hansen in Meet John Doe (1941), Detective Sergeant Gillespie in Spellbound (1945), Chief Inspector Bernie Ohls in The Big Sleep (1946). Later there was Arvide Abernathy in Guys and Dolls (1955), Warlock (1959), and television into the 1980s, some of it for Dick Powell.
Our own review of The Big Sleep does not mention him, and that is roughly the measure of what he did. Hawks's film belongs to Bogart and Bacall, and Ohls is there so that Marlowe has someone official to talk to; Toomey plays him without asking for more. It sounds like faint praise. It is not. A thriller with a muddled plot needs a few people in it who seem to know exactly where they are, and he was one of them.
The film we would send you to for him is Meet John Doe. Hansen gets one speech in front of Gary Cooper, and we sat up for it: an ordinary man saying an ordinary thing, plainly, with no sense that he was being watched, and it did more for the film's argument than most of what Cooper says around it. That is the whole of his gift. He does not perform decency. He arrives already possessing it and gets on with the scene.
The only reservation anyone has ever raised is that he was typecast, forever the authority or the everyman, and it is true. He did not seem to mind. "I'd rather be a supporting actor than a star," he said in the 1950s. "Supporting actors last longer." His career ran from the first talkies to the age of the video recorder, so on the evidence he was right.
Biography
Regis Toomey was an American actor. Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, he studied drama at the University of Pittsburgh and began his career on the stage as a musical performer. Throat problems ended his singing career, and he made his film debut in Alibi (1929). He went on to appear in more than 180 films, initially as a leading man before finding greater success as a character actor.
Toomey is known for roles including Sanders in His Girl Friday (1940), Chief Inspector Bernie Ohls in The Big Sleep (1946), Det. Sgt. Gillespie in Spellbound (1945), Bert Hansen in Meet John Doe (1941), Mr. Miller in The Bishop's Wife (1947), and Arvide Abernathy in Guys and Dolls (1955). He also appeared in television series such as The Time Tunnel (1966). He died in 1991.
