Terry Kiser

Bernie Lomax is dead for most of Weekend at Bernie's (1989), and Terry Kiser spends the film being carried about, propped up, waved at and taken for a man enjoying his own party. The part could have gone to a dummy. It went to an actor, and the whole joke depends on that: a body has to flop, slide and settle a fraction after we expect it to, and only somebody breathing can get the timing right. Kiser gets it right, again and again, and never looks as though he is working.

He had been working for twenty years by then. Kiser studied industrial engineering at the University of Kansas and worked as an engineer before the theatre took him, and he trained at the Actors Studio under Lee Strasberg, which is not the background you would guess from the corpse. His film debut was a small part in Paul Newman's Rachel, Rachel (1968), as the young preacher at a revival meeting who works the congregation until strangers are weeping and holding one another. Newman keeps his camera on Joanne Woodward, so Kiser's job is to be the noise she cannot get away from. We sat rigid through the scene, embarrassed for her and then slightly for ourselves, and that only happens because the preacher is wholly convincing. He believes every word, or plays a man who does, and from the pew the difference does not matter.

He moved to Los Angeles in the 1970s and became one of those faces television relies on: dozens of guest parts, a handful of series that did not last. The recurring role of Vic Hitler, a narcoleptic stand-up comic in Hill Street Blues (1984), showed what he could do with a running gag. Dr Crews, the psychiatrist in Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood (1988), showed the other thing he was for: a man who looks at a frightened girl and sees an opportunity. Producers noticed. Kiser was cast, over and over, as the sleazy one, the conniving one, the one you were not supposed to trust, in comedy and in drama alike.

It suited him. He plays greed without winking and dishonesty without apology, and he is usually funnier for it. The cost came after the two Bernie films, the sequel arriving in 1993: the parts got smaller and the types got narrower, and an actor with Strasberg training spent much of the 1990s in supporting roles that asked him to do again what he had already done. His own advice to actors was to "stop intellectualizing and just do it", and you can see the sense of it in Bernie, who does nothing for an entire film and is never dull. If you want to know what Kiser could do, start with the corpse and then go back to the preacher. The same man is in both, and in neither of them is he trying to be liked.