William Hickey looked, and sounded, like a man who might not last the scene, and then out-thought everyone in it. A character actor who arrived on screen late and with a rasp for a voice, best met as the old don in Prizzi's Honor.
Fi1m perspective
The voice comes first: a rasp, as if the words were being dragged across gravel. Then the face, dried out and creased, and a body that seems to need the furniture to get across a room. Only afterwards do you notice the eyes, which have been working since he came in. William Hickey played old men who looked finished and were not, and the pleasure of watching him was waiting for everyone else on screen to realise it.
He was a working actor for most of the century and a famous one for very little of it. He started on radio as a child in 1938, made his Broadway debut in 1951, and spent the 1960s and 1970s on stage, in television and in supporting film parts, among them a historian in Little Big Man (1970), while teaching at HB Studio in New York, where he had trained under Herbert Berghof and Uta Hagen. Then, in his late fifties, John Huston cast him as Don Corrado Prizzi in Prizzi's Honor (1985), and the screen found a use for him.
Huston's film is a crime romance that takes its killers' feelings seriously, and it belongs to Jack Nicholson and Kathleen Turner. But it needs the family to be more than a vague pressure somewhere off screen, and Hickey and Anjelica Huston are the reason it is. He makes the Don's authority peculiar and faintly unnerving, and we were more unsettled by him than we expected to be, because the frailty is not a trick and neither is the calculation behind it; you keep waiting for the body to give out and it is the mind that moves. It is the part the rest of his career had been rehearsing, and he was not alone in thinking so.
The work that followed was supporting and mostly comic: Ubertino da Casale in The Name of the Rose (1986), Uncle Lewis in National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation (1989), and the voice of Dr. Finkelstein in Henry Selick's The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993). For Hickey a voice-only part gives up half the instrument, though the half that remains is the more distinctive. Our review of Selick's film went to the animation and to Danny Elfman's music rather than to any one voice, which seems fair; it is a film that belongs to its makers.
He kept working until his death in 1997, and the notices have never had a hard word for him. The nearest thing to a reservation is that the parts came so late, and that most of his working life was spent teaching other people to do what he did. Watch Prizzi's Honor first. After that you will hear him before you see him, and you will know to keep an eye on him.
Biography
William Hickey was an American actor and acting teacher. Born in Brooklyn, New York, he began his career as a child actor on stage and radio in the late 1930s, later making his Broadway debut in the 1950s. He maintained a long association with the HB Studio in Greenwich Village, where he taught for over four decades; his students included Steve McQueen, Barbra Streisand and Sandy Dennis.
Hickey appeared in numerous films and television productions, often in character roles. He received an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor for his performance as Don Corrado Prizzi in Prizzi's Honor (1985). Other notable credits include Uncle Lewis in National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation (1989), the voice of Dr. Finkelstein in The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) and Rudolf Smuntz in MouseHunt (1997). He also had recurring television roles, such as in Tales from the Crypt.
Hickey died in New York City in 1997 at the age of 69.
