By HE standards there were three stand-out James Tolkan performances. All supporting, of course…Tolkan wasn’t a charismatic lead-actor type. He alwasy played the bald-headed hardass.
The first that really connected was a rigid, button-down Boston mob guy hiring Peter Boyle to clip Robert Mitchum in The Friends of Eddie Coyle (’72).
The second was George Polito, the vindictive, hard-nosed district attorney who went after Treat Williams‘ Danny Ciello (and some of the others on the original narco team, including Jerry Orbach‘s Gus Levy) in Sidney Lumet‘s Prince of the City (’81).
Tolkan’s third big score was playing Chicago real-estate salesman Dave Moss in the original 1984 B’way stage production of David Mamet‘s Glengarry Glen Ross. I caught that show on opening night (42 years ago) with all the big-gun critics in the room.
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Have any of the Tolkan obits so far mentioned these three performances? Of course not. They only acknowledge his roles in Top Gun and in the Back to the Future franchise and yaddah-yaddah.