Earlier this month, America lost one of its funniest and most versatile character actors, Garrit Graham. He was one of those actors whom everyone recognized instantly, but no one ever knew his name. Rather, he was “that guy who played X in Z,” where X is one of your favorite characters in one of your favorite (Z) movies—often a cult movie like Phantom of the Paradise.
For me, that favorite role/movie was in one of Robert Zemeckis’s early films, 1980s Used Cars. I should really devote an entire post to that movie, surely one of the best B-comedy flix ever made, with humor on a level of Mel Brooks and the Marx Brothers. And Graham one was the elements that made it so damned funny. As Jeff, the nerdy-yet-hip sidekick to Kurt Russell’s fast-talking main character, he both abets and reigns in the antics. Jeff is a mensch, nearly crippled by his own neurosis, yet smart and kind of sexy, too. Best of all, he becomes a hero at the end of the film. (He also participated in one the riskiest practical stunts I’ve ever seen, in which he is almost run over by a hurtling muscle-car.)
Sadly, Graham never achieved the kind of fame he deserved, not the secondary kind of fame that some great character actors enjoy. With a little luck, he might have filled the same kind of niche in the 1980s as Steve Buscemi would in the 1990s. Instead, Graham worked steadily in small, one-off parts in film and on TV. (He appeared twice in the Star Trek universe, playing different aliens.)
He was also something of a renaissance man, having co-written one song for the Grateful Dead and penned teleplays for TV.
The world is a little less interesting without him in it.
Godspeed, Mr. Graham…
