As some of those character names echo, James portrayed a lot of villainy and savage desperation over the course of his career, inaugurated by his performance as burning racist Ralph Henshaw in 1966’s In the Heat of the Night. But it belied the person James was in real life – a gentle, intellectual artist who felt the pull to express himself in a myriad of ways, who loved his mother and his Greek heritage, and who requested that any condolences after his death be expressed through donations to the St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital and the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.
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If you’ve ever experienced the faded chromatic haze of 1970s and 1980s film and television – either as it was unfolding or through the prism of modern nostalgia streaming – then you’ve almost certainly been privy to the odd, particular charisma of actor/artist Anthony James.
Anthony James (real name Jimmy Anthony) died at 77 years in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in May 2020 from cancer, in a year that claimed so many admired performers it’s difficult to fathom. Much of the ink dedicated to James’s career focused on his gaunt, willowy countenance, a six-and-a-half-foot raptor bird with a sculpted face that burrowed itself into the collective consciousness of a couple generations’ worth of audiences. In fact, he titled his 2014 memoir (and tome to his beloved mom) Acting My Face, at once embracing and distancing himself from his moneymaking visage. Like Jack Elam before him or Danny Trejo after – character actors whose physicality define the roles they play, and who genre-jump with relative ease – James was that guy, an instantly recognizable persona that made you feel … something.
Burnt Offerings
That something, if you ask anyone who saw James as The Chauffeur in director Dan Curtis’s Burnt Offerings (1976) at an impressionable age, is likely a potent cocktail of terror and anxiety. In the film, James’s nattily outfitted, menacingly smirking driver is a harbinger of death, a recurring fever hallucination/repressed memory belonging to Oliver Reed’s doomed patriarch, whose soul is being slowly consumed by guilt and a haunted house. Not only does James’s tall dark phantom drive Reed insane, he gets to kill Bette Davis by ramrodding her with – I’m not kidding – a coffin. Seriously, take a trip through some of the James appreciation posts on social media and marvel at the nightmare fuel his Offerings role supplied for a swath of folks. The performance is impactful from a horror standpoint, sure, but there’s something else going on. I alluded to The Chauffeur’s smirking presence above, but that’s not really accurate; James straight up smiles whenever he shows up in the film, all full face-splitting and teeth aglow, and coupled with dark sunglasses and lean black threads, he’s also … cool. Fittingly, like most supporting stars who jolt to life the movies they briefly appear in, he gets his own special “and Anthony James” in the end credits. It’s the kind of performance cult legacies are made of.
While we’re scratching at the legacy itch, has anyone in film and/or TV history outside of Groucho Marx had more memorable character names than Anthony James? He was Chickenfoot on Gunsmoke early in his career, one of four (!) different roles he had throughout the series’ run; Charlie Inch on television’s Mod Squad in 1972; Sickle in 1978’s Return from Witch Mountain; Grundelius in Blue Thunder (John Badham’s 1983 feature); Three-Finger Harry on The A-Team, one of three roles he had during the 1984-1986 run of that show (does anyone actually know if the character had three fingers?); Hector Savage in 1991’s Naked Gun 2½:The Smell of Fear; and his last screen role, Skinny Dubois, in Clint Eastwood’s Oscar-winning Unforgiven.
With Clint Eastwood
More cool cred: James blazes through the existential cult car chase movie Vanishing Point (1978, directed by Richard C. Sarafian) as one half of a gay hitchhiking duo – again, stylishly attired in a pink silk button-up and white hip-huggers – who attempt to rob at gunpoint Barry Newman’s Kowalski, himself in the midst of a cross-country sojourn. It ends with the couple (“just married,” according to the sign on the back of their stalled station wagon) booted to the curb, but the mostly unpatronizing infusion of queerdom in an action film of this era is a rarity, even if it also teeters on the edge of stereotypical tropes.
Vanishing Point
As some of those character names echo, James portrayed a lot of villainy and savage desperation over the course of his career, inaugurated by his performance as burning racist Ralph Henshaw in 1966’s In the Heat of the Night. But it belied the person James was in real life – a gentle, intellectual artist who felt the pull to express himself in a myriad of ways, who loved his mother and his Greek heritage, and who requested that any condolences after his death be expressed through donations to the St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital and the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.
And here’s where it gets really interesting. After Unforgiven in 1992, James flipped his performing career into a late-act residence as a painter of austere and abstract dreamscapes, earning gallery exhibitions in Boston, New York, San Francisco, Santa Fe, and Japan over the last 28 years of his life, expending at least the same amount of time and passion he had as a successful actor. Employing acrylic and oil to mostly large-scale canvases, James uses shapes, Greek glyphs, and emotionally ominous color palettes to render imagery that’s caught between esoteric landscape and industrial line work. They’re shadowy, blurred, and mystical, but the pieces – particularly Road Home (48×48 acrylic painting on canvas) – wield their mysterious textures for placid, tranquil ends.
Whether skipping through the televised, hi-brow/lo-brow galaxies of Star Trek: The Next Generation or Buck Rodgers in the 25th Century, riding the cinematic ranges of High Plains Drifter or The Culpepper Cattle Co., or inciting sleepless nights via The Teacher or Nightmares, James was many things to many fans. Even his mother, Marika, refused to typecast him as a baddie or anything other than his fundamental self. He wrote in his memoir, “She always thought of me as the heroic romantic lead.…”
But Anthony James could only ever be true to the one thing he really was: an artist.
