Jon Polito, who has died aged 65 from complications of cancer, was a prolific character actor who specialised in hoods and cops. His stocky build, calculating eyes and clammy countenance, not to mention a distinctive voice as dry and crunchy as autumn leaves, made him instantly recognisable, even if many admirers couldn’t quite place him. “All they ever do is say: ‘I know you. Oh my God. You were …,’” he said.
He was part of the unofficial repertory company favoured by the film-making brothers Joel and Ethan Coen, whom he called “our generation’s Orson Welles, Billy Wilder, Hitchcock”. They first cast him in their third movie, the wry 1990 thriller Miller’s Crossing. He played the Prohibition-era mob boss Johnny Caspar, who sets out the story’s themes in an opening speech, lamenting the decline of “friendship, character, ethics”. He was a scream as the blustering, highly strung Caspar, dabbing at his sweaty brow as he contemplated the defections and double-crosses mounting up around him in the film’s near-unfathomable plot.
Polito, who had been best known until then for theatre (he had won an Obie in 1980 for his work with the Dodger and BAM theatre companies), credited Miller’s Crossing with launching the second stage of his career. Its influence endured. In 2005, he said: “The horrible flaw that young film-makers have made with me has been when they say: ‘I wrote a role for you’, and what they really did was rewrite Miller’s Crossing.”
He worked with the Coen brothers a further four times in smaller roles: he was a sad-faced studio functionary in Barton Fink (1991), an award-winning black comedy about a writer who loses his integrity in Hollywood; an apoplectic businessman in the screwball fantasy The Hudsucker Proxy (1994); a humble private eye in the comedy The Big Lebowski (1998); and a dry-cleaning entrepreneur in the film noir The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001). Apart from his collaborations with the Coens, he played more than 200 TV and film parts, and was a regular in the much-admired early 1990s NBC crime drama Homicide: Life on the Street, in which he played Detective Steve Crosetti.
Born and raised in southwest Philadelphia, Polito was the youngest of three children of Dee (nee Pompei) and John Polito. He studied drama at Villanova University, outside Philadelphia, then moved to New York after graduating and progressed steadily through the ranks of the city’s theatre scene. He starred with Faye Dunaway in The Curse of an Aching Heart and played Howard Wagner in a 1984 Broadway revival of Death of a Salesman, starring Dustin Hoffman as Willy Loman and John Malkovich as Biff. He also appeared in a version of that production directed for television the following year by Volker Schlöndorff.
From the 1980s onwards, he worked constantly in television and cinema. He was in the mythical adventure Highlander (1986), the Richard Pryor vehicle Critical Condition (1987), the Mickey Rourke boxing drama Homeboy (1988) and the mobster comedy The Freshman (1990), in which Marlon Brando sent up his own Godfather performance. He also starred in two TV series for Michael Mann: he had a recurring role as a mob boss in Crime Story (1986-88); and played a camp gangster with shoulder-pads in two episodes of Miami Vice (1988).
After the first two series of Homicide: Life on the Street, Polito was dropped at the network’s request to make way for a new character. The producers promised Polito that he would be reinstated in future episodes. Not believing their assurances, he made rash and derogatory remarks about the show to the press, a move he later regretted when he was sacked permanently. (Crosetti was brought back briefly from beyond the grave in Homicide: The Movie, made in 2000 for television.)
But Polito was rarely out of work for long. Among the highlights were memorable appearances on sitcoms such as Modern Family, Scrubs, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia and Seinfeld, as well as guest spots on Gilmore Girls and Desperate Housewives. In the children’s comedy Stuart Little (1999), he was hilarious as a ghoulish detective with a penchant for crime-scene photographs. Other films he had notable roles in include The Honeymooners (2005), Clint Eastwood’s Flags of Our Fathers (2006), Ridley Scott’s American Gangster (2007) and Tim Burton’s Big Eyes (2014).
In 1999 he met Darryl Armbruster, an actor, and they married last year. Armbruster survives him, as does his brother, Jack, and sister, Rosemary.
• Jon Raymond Polito, actor, born 29 December 1950; died 1 September 2016
