CHARLES McGRAW

(1914-80. Born Charles Butters, Des Moines, Iowa)

Square-jawed, solidly built film noir mainstay, distinguished by a chiselled profile and the kind of rasping drawl you might get by gargling gravel. (“Without the voice,” he once remarked to his daughter, “we’d be living in a two-room flat somewhere.”) Best known as an impassive and intimidating heavy, he also had the gravitas to play single-minded lawmen and military types. His biographer, Alan K. Rode, described him as a “brusquely charming rogue”.

Learnt his trade at the Group Theatre in New York before transferring to Hollywood. Announced himself on the big screen as a hit man in Robert Siodmak’s classic The Killers. Supporting roles in later life in both mainstream productions (Spartacus, The Birds) and cult movies: In Cold Blood; Tell Them Willie Boy is Here; LQ Jones’ sci-fi oddity A Boy and His Dog. His final film was the political thriller Twilight’s Last Gleaming.

 Among his TV work was the role of Rick in a short-lived Casablanca (1955-56).

Off-screen he was a hard drinker (predictably, one of his closest friends was Robert Mitchum). He died aged 66 in a gruesome manner, bleeding to death after falling in the shower, broken glass severing an artery in his left arm.

 

 

Five standout roles

As the gunman Al, he and William Conrad track down Burt Lancaster’s wretched Swede in The Killers.

As Moxie, mob enforcer in T-Men, he turns up the heat on Wallace Ford in the memorable steam-room sequence. (The first of five films he made with director Anthony Mann.)

As detective Walter Brown, he matches wits with Marie Windsor, and pits them against her pursuers, in the textbook B-thriller The Narrow Margin.

As Joe Peters, the straight-shooting insurance agent led astray by Joan Dixon’s gold-digger, in the brisk RKO noir Roadblock

As the no-account father of Robert Blake’s Perry Smith in In Cold Blood, he elicits audience sympathy – perhaps more than the character deserves – in a poignant reminiscence.
Kevin Grant