Tracey Walter is the man a few feet from the star: the mechanic, the henchman, the cowboy sidekick who says one odd thing and makes the scene better for it. He has spent a career in supporting parts and has rarely seemed to need anything larger.
Fi1m perspective
He is usually somewhere behind the lead. In Repo Man (1984) he is Miller, a mechanic given to philosophy, the sort of man other films would cut to for a laugh and then forget. In Batman (1989) he is Bob the Goon, the henchman at Jack Nicholson's shoulder. In City Slickers (1991) he is Cookie, a sidekick on a comedy cattle drive. None of these is a large part. Each is the one you find yourself describing to a friend after the plot has gone.
The career runs the way character careers do. He began small and often uncredited in the early 1970s, in Serpico (1973) and Annie Hall (1977), and got noticed in the 1980s, first through Nicholson, with whom he worked from Goin' South (1978) across nine films, and then through Repo Man. Jonathan Demme used him six times between 1986 and 2004, starting with Something Wild (1986), where he is the Country Squire, and including The Silence of the Lambs (1991), where he is Lamar. Danny DeVito directed him three times between 1996 and 2003. He kept working in supporting parts on film and television until he stopped, around 2016.
We recommended Repo Man for its performances, and his is the one we think of first. Miller ought to be the film's crank, and Walter plays him without a wink, as a man who has simply arrived at his conclusions and sees no reason to apologise for them. We laughed at him, and somewhere in the middle of the speech we noticed we had started listening, which is the whole trick and very few actors can do it. Alex Cox gives him room; Walter does not waste an inch of it.
The cost of being this kind of actor is that he is easy to leave out. In our reviews of The Silence of the Lambs, Something Wild, Batman and City Slickers we did not find space to name him, and that is not a complaint about the performances. It is what a few minutes at the edge of a Demme ensemble or a Nicholson turn amounts to on the page. The one reservation his reputation carries is typecasting, the eccentric and the lowlife again and again, and there is something in it. In Erin Brockovich (2000) he arrives late as Charles Embry, and our quarrel was with Susannah Grant's script, which needs him to turn up at exactly the right moment, not with him. We will say no more about him than we did then.
He once put it this way: "As humbly as I can put it, I've really been blessed with terrific success in films." Most of that success happened a few feet from someone more famous. Watch Repo Man for the man himself, and then watch the others and see how long it takes you to spot him.
Biography
Tracey Walter is an American actor. He was born on 25 November 1947 in Jersey City, New Jersey. He grew up there as the son of a truck driver and attended St Anthony's High School. He developed an interest in acting after seeing the off-Broadway play Scuba Duba and studied at the Totem Pole Playhouse under Jean Stapleton. His screen debut came in the 1971 film Ginger.
Walter appeared in more than 170 film and television roles over a career spanning several decades. He is known for collaborations with Jack Nicholson, appearing together in nine films beginning with Goin' South (1978). He worked with director Jonathan Demme on six films, including The Silence of the Lambs (1991) and Philadelphia (1993), and with Danny DeVito on Matilda (1996), Death to Smoochy (2002) and Duplex (2003). His role as Miller in Repo Man (1984) earned him a Saturn Award for Best Supporting Actor.
Other credits include Bob the Goon in Batman (1989), an FBI agent in Matilda (1996), a librarian in Philadelphia (1993), Charles Embry in Erin Brockovich (2000), and Ike Stratman in an episode of Criminal Minds (2005). He also appeared in Annie Hall (1977) and Man on the Moon (1999).
