Joe is aces at extolling underappreciated character actors from Hollywood’s classic period, but was dumbfounded when Frank suggested profiling today’s subject — Timothy Carey, a product of the early 1950’s.
Joe said he had never heard of him, but once he saw the face he knew him. We think it’s a reaction you may well have. So, who IS this guy, anyway.
Let’s just say that long before offscreen craziness became chic among contemporary Hollywood actors, Carey was regarded as the genuine article.
A big guy (he stood 6-feet-4) his specialty was playing supporting characters who were either violent criminals or psychotics, often both. He did so with such convincing power that those he worked with became convinced he really was nuts. He was scary, declared child actor Charles Herbert.
Carey had a way of spitting out his lines through clenched teeth that proved especially menacing. And, he often proved disruptive on movie sets.
He unnerved stars by improving in disconcerting ways: spraying Marlon Brando in the face with beer in 1953’s motorcycle epic, The Wild One; portraying a bordello buncer who threatens James Dean in 1955’s East of Eden. (Brando later cast him in his 1961 western, One-Eyed Jacks, and weary of his behind the cameras antics, wound up stabbing him with a pen.)
Carey is understood to have been the only actor Eden director Elia Kazan ever physically assaulted on the set. Let’s say he wasn’t the easiest actor to corral.
Still he worked a lot — nearly 100 credits from 1951 until 1994, the year he died of a stroke at age 65. Carey is most notable in the films he made for director Stanley Kubrick. He is the sniveling French private unjustly condemned to death in 1957’s Paths of Glory. The year before he excelled as a hit man hired to shoot a racehorse in Kubrick’s The Killing.
Also, watch for him as a slobbering gangster grappling with Gene Nelson down a steep staircase in Andre De Toth’s tidy 1953 noir, Crime Wave. Carey claimed he never drinked, smoked nor snorted any illicit substances. I got my own cocaine, he said, my own personality.
He put it best: Hollywood never saw a guy like me. They think I’m a man from another planet.
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I always point Carey out to my daughter as “that crazy guy that other guys try to emulate.” She’s got it now.
TIMOTHY CAREY didn’t just play CRAZY, he was CRAZY!
So many directors liked him, hired him, and later wished they hadn’t.
Sure he could deliver, but the intense effort to get that certain performance from a supporting player no less, often came with a lot of trouble in the form of his psychotic behavior.
His crazy ‘method’ style of acting seems more akin to his real personality.
And it wasn’t just FILM NOIR crime movies he was menacing in, he could be just just as mean in westerns like THE LAST WAGON and RIO CONCHOS., and just plain kooky in those BEACH movies with Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello.
I remember at Universal, Carey was on one of our AIRWOLF TV episodes, but by that late time in his career he was much more subdued.
Frank’s old endearment term “aces” describing Joe… The last time I heard that was when Warren Beatty said it in 1974, THE PARALLAX VIEW.
Well Joe & Frank are ‘aces’ but they need to get the imaging size problem worked out, TIMOTHY CAREY looks even crazier than usual with just half a face!
Note: Carey died in 1994, not ’64. Either that or he really pulled off a stunt by rising from the dead to appear in The Monkees’ “Head” four years later!