Another Great Actor Left Us This Week. Why Did So Many Undervalue Him?
My Memories of Ned Beatty
I’ve been very busy this past week, so I haven’t yet had a chance to pay tribute to an actor I greatly admired who died on Sunday. Ned Beatty was one of the great character actors in history. Once classified ‘the busiest actor in Hollywood’ during the 1970s he certainly was. From his debut in Deliverance to Nashville, All the President’s Men, and his Oscar nominated turn in Network to his memorable turns in The Big Easy and Rudy, he gave some of the most memorable performances on film. He appeared in some of the most memorable TV movies and limited series in the 1970s and 1980s — The Execution of Private Slovik, The Story of Jim Jones, A Woman Called Golda — and continued to be a force well into his seventies.
However, I’d actually like to start with something that makes less sense when you consider his credits and ability. During the 1990s, Beatty seemed to be at the center of a lot of jokes about his level of skill as an actor. I remember an episode of Married: With Children, where Al invokes a huge laugh by wanting to stay home and watch Beatty performer as a singer. On the cult show The Critic, we see a clip of Jay Sherman saying: “That is why the best actor of this, or indeed any generation, is Ned Beatty.” A crowd of Cubans see this and start yelling: “El Critico Loco!” and start throwing things at the screen. These may have been gentle poke, but I remember reading an issue of Entertainment Weekly in 1996 saying directly that Homicide was a much better show now that Ned Beatty was no longer weighing it down. (I strongly disagree with that, and I’ll explain why.)
I can understand why some celebrities are the topic of abuse and jokes, but Beatty never seemed to fit that mold. He was never a leading man, he was never a celebrity. Character actors are lucky to be acknowledged by critics, and it’s rare that they get targeted by pop culture. Why was there this fixation on him? I’ll never understand.
As those of you who’ve followed my blog are aware, I worshiped Homicide when it was on the air and beyond. When I first began watching it, Beatty’s character had left the series so I only heard about him when ever Munch complained how much he missed him. Then about a year later I started seeing reruns and I understood why he did and why I’d missed out.
Beatty portrayed Stanley Bolander aka ‘The Big Man’. Like so many of the original case, Bolander was based on an actual homicide detective Donald Worden. (Like Bolander, Worden didn’t mince words: interviewed about the show, his first words were: “The series sucks.”) In 1993, it was still rare for a major Hollywood actor to appear on a TV series, so Beatty was a huge get. And in the three truncated seasons Beatty was on the show, he made an impression.
Bolander was the twenty-five year veteran on the squad, chugging towards his pension. His main partner on the series was John Munch (Richard Belzer, starting an arc that would last more than twenty years and countless shows). Throughout the series, Munch was in an endless battle for Bolander’s respect, which he didn’t willingly give. Bolander was always complaining about the end of his marriage and how Munch paled in comparison to his old partner, Mitch. He suffered Munch’s conspiracy theories and his old romances by basically ignoring them, something none of Munch’s future partners had the logic to do.
Bolander spent much of the series immersed in melancholy, part of it dealing with being ‘murder police’ part with the end of his marriage. Beatty was always good at showing the humanity in his character. In one of the more memorable moments of the first season, Bolander’s ends an episode with a monologue about love — how it killed Elvis, how he danced to Elvis at his wedding, how he wasn’t sure his wife loved him. The episode ended with Bolander singing ‘Love Me Tender’ to himself. It was a poignant moment. (Indeed, it affected the series run. That moment was supposed to air in the season finale, but NBC executives found it so depressing that they moved another episode with a more upbeat end in its place.)
Bolander was the only detective who you’d confide in rather than confess after intense interrogation. He was also the only detective capable of talking to Giardello (the late Yaphet Kotto) as an equal. There were some very moving moments, particularly when Bolander brought Gee dinner and the Lieutenant confided how much he missed his wife and how much the job had taken from him. You couldn’t see Gee saying that to anybody else.
Beatty left the show on bad terms at the end of the third season. Upset at how the shooting of the series left him no time to appear in the most recent revival of Show Boat, he quit while it was unclear whether Homicide would be brought back for a fourth season. Tom Fontana and company remained angry about it for awhile. In retrospect, I don’t think I blame Beatty for doing so. Beatty was a busy actor before he signed on to the show. In the course of his three years, his character got pushed more and more to the background behind Andre Braugher and Kyle Secor. More to the point, every season Homicide was on the air, everybody on the series had to wait months to know if they would be coming back. Living in limbo was galling for everybody in the cast; I can’t imagine how bad it was for a pro like Beatty.
That being said, it was a loss for the series. For the remainder of the show’s run, there were be many new detectives in the squad, but no one like Stan Bolander, no elder statesman, no one professional. The series stopped trying to get actors that looked like detectives and more like matinee idols, and a lot of fans didn’t look favorably on it.
Beatty was a great actor, one of the few pure character actors still alive. Most of the pure ones — the Harry Dean Stantons, the Jon Politos, — have left us. He deserved to be remembered approvingly, for unforgettable roles like Stanley Bolander.