Seen and Heard

On a recent airing of "Kevin Pollak's Chat Show," guest Jennifer Tilly poked fun at her otherwise reputable acting career - which includes a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination for Woody Allen's "Bullets Over Broadway" and an acclaimed performance in the 1996 crime noir "Bound" - being "overshadowed by my dances with Chuckie," in reference to her, to date, four films in the "Child's Play" slasher franchise.

Jennifer Tilly shares a smoke with Chuckie (voiced by Brad Dourif).

Tilly likened her situation to what happens when a celebrity passes away. For instance, upon the death of Gene Wilder, she commented that everyone was saying, "Willie Wonka is dead!" She uttered incredulously, "Are you kidding me? This brilliant actor who was in 'Young Frankenstein' and 'Blazing Saddles'...I  hated 'Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.' That was one of my favorite books."

Tilly continued, "Same with John Heard. When he passed away, they went, 'The dad from "Home Alone" is dead,' and I'm like, 'I don't even remember him in "Home Alone."' I remember him in 'Cutter and Bone,' I remember a brilliant stage and film actor."

Just as every obituary for John Heard was headlined with the
dismissive qualifier "'Home Alone' Dad," Lord knows, if anything
happens to Catherine O'Hara, she'll be shrugged off as "'Home
Alone' Mom," never mind her incomparable work on "SCTV" or
her distinctive comedic roles in films directed by Christopher Guest.

John Heard died of a heart attack while recovering from minor back surgery on July 21, 2017 at the age of 71. The surgery did not play a role in his death. In a 43-year career, the actor appeared in around 100 motion pictures, over 30 TV movies and miniseries, a half dozen short films, and guest-starred in nearly 40 television series. Heard was very active on the stage as well, garnering Obie Awards for a pair of Off-Broadway performances in the late 1970s and early '80s.

Two of John Heard's early screen roles were directed by Joan Micklin Silver, one of the most important female filmmakers in American cinema whose pioneering output included modest little dramas featuring realistic, heartfelt performances, among them her breakthrough picture, 1975's "Hester Street," with an Oscar-nominated turn by Carol Kane as a Jewish immigrant in 1896 Manhattan, and probably the director's most beloved movie, 1988's "Crossing Delancey," a bittersweet romantic comedy about a Manhattanite with airs (Amy Irving) pursued by a sidewalk pickle vendor (Peter Riegert).

In 1977, Silver directed "Between the Lines," a sleeper about the staff of an underground Boston newspaper (not dissimilar to New York's Village Voice) contending with a takeover by big business. John Heard headed a cast of soon-to-be-familiar faces - Lindsay Crouse, Jeff Goldblum, Jill Eikenberry, Bruno Kirby, Stephen Collins - along with Michael J. Pollard, Marilu Henner, and National Lampoon writer Doug Kenney.

Doug Kenney and Jeff Goldblum share a scene in "Between the
Lines." Besides co-founding National Lampoon magazine, Kenney
had a hand in the scripts for "Animal House" and "Caddyshack."
At age 33, the openly troubled Kenney, whether intentionally or not,
fell to his death off a 35-foot cliff lookout in Kaui, Hawaii. 

John Heard limned an evocative portrait of Charles, a Salt Lake City civil servant obsessed with an on-again off-again married court filer, Laura, played by Mary Beth Hurt, in a melancholy romance directed by Joan Micklin Silver in 1979, initially titled "Head Over Heels."

Based on a novel titled Chilly Scenes of Winter by short story writer Anne Beattie, the film contained the coda of a happy ending with the elusive Hurt showing up at Heard's apartment to make breakfast and declare her love for him as he avers that people, like the breakfast eggs, should never be separated. In 1982, the movie was re-released as "Chilly Scenes of Winter," with a new ambiguous ending that left questions unanswered, resulting in a production that had a more successful run than earlier.

Déjà vu: John Heard (top) in "Between the Lines"
and (bottom) in "Chilly Scenes in Winter."

"Chilly Scenes of Winter" was produced by a unique threesome of actors: Griffin Dunne (best known as the ill-fated backpacker Jack Goodman in "An American Werewolf in London"), Amy Robinson (memorable as Harvey Keitel's epileptic girlfriend in Martin Scorsese's "Mean Streets"), and Mark Metcalf (forever etched in moviegoers' minds as that "sneaky little shit" Niedermeyer in "Animal House"). Metcalf portrays Mary Beth Hurt's sometime spouse, an ex-pro footballer-turned-A-frame house salesman in "Chilly Scenes of Winter." Dunne has an amusing cameo as the anal retentive boyfriend of Heard's sister.

Peter Riegert (right), familiar to National Lampoon fans as Delta
House stalwart Boon in "Animal House," delivers a sly performance
as John Heard's libidinous roommate in "Chilly Scenes of Winter."

Adam Lippe, an online film critic, noted, "'Chilly Scenes of Winter' is a far darker and funnier movie than anything else Joan Micklin Silver has had her hands on, since it doesn't go soft, mushy and obvious, and has real insight into romantic obsession without copping out." Vincent Canby of The New York Times observed, "There's not a false performance in the film."

"It's not that it doesn't still hurt, it's just you get used to it." The
revamped ending depicts a Laura-less Charles working out his
frustration with a pell-mell dash through a Salt Lake City park.

In between "Between the Lines" and "Chilly Scenes of Winter," John Heard had a costarring role in the 1977 romantic drama "First Love," featuring Susan Dey, in a role that attempted to shake her squeaky-clean Laurie Patridge persona from TV's "The Partridge Family," and William Katt, on the heels of his breakout screen role in "Carrie." "First Love" was directed by Joan Darling, who, like Joan Micklin Silver, was regarded as breaking new ground as part of a small circle of women directing major studio features.

Susan Dey saddles up behind John Heard in "First Love."

Also in 1977, John Heard appeared in a humbly likable but little seen love story from 1977 called "Rush It!" Judith Kahan, a longtime television actress and writer, is featured as the spunky bike messenger looking for romance in New York City. Vying for her affection are coworkers Heard and, in his movie debut, Tom Berenger. The cast included Heard's "Between the Lines" costar Jill Eikenberry. Coming in at a brisk 80 minutes, the picture was co-written and directed by Gary Youngman, the son of the "King of One-Liners," comedian Henny Youngman.

Having proven himself as a light romantic lead, John Heard sought meatier roles. In "On the Yard" (1978), he portrayed an obstinate prison inmate who sets off a chain of unfortunate events when he buys a carton of smokes from the top con that he is unable to pay back for in time. Based on a novel by Malcolm Braly, a writer who often found himself behind bars, the taut drama was produced by Joan Micklin Silver and directed by her husband, Raphael D. Silver. 

In 1980, John Heard shouldered the mantle of portraying pioneering Beat Generation poet and novelist Jack Kerouac, author of the quintessential road-trip saga On the Road in 1957, in "Heart Beat," based on the 1976 memoir by Carolyn Cassady titled Heart Beat: My Life with Jack and Neal. Neal Cassady, who served as the model for the carefree maverick character of Dean Moriarty in On the Road is played by Nick Nolte, while Sissy Spacek portrays Carolyn, who was, in real life, not enchanted with husband Neal and Jack's beatnik lifestyle as "furtives," which is how Kerouac described themselves.

John Heard, Sissy Spacek, and Nick Nolte
are on the road in "Heart Beat."

"Heart Beat" was scripted and directed by John Byrum, a filmmaker known for a string of very personal projects that may have satisfied himself but did little in financial returns. His first film, 1975's "Inserts," centered on a former hot shot director in early 1930s Hollywood, referred to only as Boy Wonder (Richard Dreyfuss), now a recluse who is content to shoot pornographic shorts in his decaying mansion. The ensemble cast included Jessica Harper, Bob Hoskins, Veronica Cartwright, and Stephen Davies. Byrum later remarked, "People seem to think it's either the worst trash or else a piece of thundering genius. I see it simply as a love story."

In 1984, John Byrum directed "The Razor's Edge," a vanity piece for Bill Murray, who co-wrote the screenplay with Byrum in the hopes of showing his mettle as a dramatic leading man in the midst of the "Ghostbusters" goofiness. Based on British author W. Somerset Maugham's sweeping saga of a man's global search for the meaning of life after witnessing the horrors of the First World War, the lush, moving film featured outstanding supporting performances by Theresa Russell, Catherine Hicks, Denholm Elliott, James Keach, Saeed Jaffrey, and Bill's brother, Brian Doyle-Murray.

John Heard further explored the depths of darkness in the title role in 1981's "Cutter's Way," a conspiracy theory murder mystery in the form of a character study of an unlikable crippled Vietnam War veteran, his abused wife Mo (Lisa Eichhorn), and his amoral friend Bone (Jeff Bridges). Directed by Ivan Passer, a noted figure in the Czech New Wave cinema of the mid-1960s, the movie, which originally bore the medically misleading title "Cutter and Bone," received such negative criticism that the studio was ready to pull it from theaters only one week after its release. But then glowing reviews in Time and Newsweek rescued the flailing picture, now retitled "Cutter's Way," and it was successfully screened at a number of film festivals.

John Heard, Jeff Bridges, and Ann Dusenberry share a scene at
a shooting arcade in "Cutter's Way."

Reviewing "Cutter's Way" in Newsweek, David Ansen wrote, "Under Passer's sensitive direction, Heard gives his best film performance; he's funny and abrasive and mad, but you see the self-awareness eating him up inside."

In 1982, Heard played a troubled romantic lead in "Cat People" (pictured below), an erotic, blood-spattered update of producer Val Lewton's original 1942 psychological thriller, featuring Nastassja Kinski as a virginal orphan who discovers a horrific family curse. Directed by Paul Schrader, who, as a screenwriter, worked with Martin Scorsese on "Taxi Driver," "Raging Bull," "The Last Temptation of Christ," and "Bringing Out the Dead," the atmospheric, brooding picture cast Malcolm McDowell as Kinski's incestuous brother, along with Annette O'Toole, Ed Begley Jr., and Ruby Dee.

Roger Ebert commented that Paul Schrader's "movie creates a mood of doom, predestination, forbidden passion, and, to be be sure, a certain silliness. It's fun in the way horror movies should be fun; it's totally unbelievable in between the times it's scaring the popcorn out of you." In praise of John Heard's depiction of the conflicted zoo curator, Ebert noted, "He never seems in the grip of an ordinary sexual passion, but possesses one of those obsessions men are willing (and often are called upon) to die for."

The mid-1980s found John Heard all over the genre map. In the campy horror flick "C.H.U.D." (1984), he portrayed an investigative photojournalist who, along with a former hippie-soup kitchen vendor, played by Daniel Stern (best known as Joe Pesci's hapless bandit sidekick in "Home Alone"), exposes a nuclear waste cover-up that is transforming New York City's homeless populace into Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dwellers.

The late Jay Thomas and John Goodman appeared
as cops in a diner in a scene from "C.H.U.D."

"Who in their right mind ever watched 'C.H.U.D.'?" Heard once said. "I think you'd need to be on ecstasy to watch that movie." He remembered that Daniel Stern and he "would take turns saying, 'Holy shit!' When we were in the sewers and we saw a monster, Danny would say, 'Well, it's your turn to say, "Holy shit!"' And I'd say, 'No, it's not. It's your turn. I said, "Holy shit!" in the last scene.' I think he won."

John Heard put on a monk's frock as a sensitive novice friar in the 1985 coming-of-age comedy-drama "Heaven Help Us," set at a strict Catholic prep school in Brooklyn. Donald Sutherland plays the school's stern but sympathetic headmaster in a cast that included Andrew McCarthy, Mary Stuart Masterson, Kevin Dillon, Patrick Dempsey, Wallace Shawn, Dana Barron (the original Audrey Griswold in "National Lampoon's Vacation"), Yeardley Smith (best known as the voice of Lisa on "The Simpsons"), and Calvert DeForest (David Letterman's "Larry 'Bud' Mellman").

John Heard shows Andrew McCarthy some brotherly love
in "Heaven Help Us."

Also in 1985, Heard enjoyed a brief role as a congenial bartender in director Martin Scorsese's dark comedy about a computer word processor's nightmarish odyssey back to his SoHo home in "After Hours" New York City. Griffin Dunne, the actor who co-produced "Chilly Scenes of Winter," portrays the luckless schmo beset by one misadventure after another in a cast featuring Rosanna Arquette, Teri Garr, Catherine O'Hara, Linda Fiorentino, Verna Bloom, Tommy Chong, and Cheech Marin.

In the wee hours of the a.m., Griffin Dunne gets
bartender-ly advice from John Heard.

John Heard recalled in a 2015 interview, "Griffin Dunne and I were both terrified that Martin Scorsese didn't think we were very good - and if he didn't think we were very good, that was it. That was the end of the line. If Martin Scorsese thinks you stink, you stink. So every take, Griffin and I would be kind of looking around to see if we were okay. We would be, like, 'Okay, he didn't say anything. We must be okay.'"

Because of his experience working with actor Rip Torn and his wife, actress Geraldine Page, in a play, John Heard was recommended by Page herself for the role of her concerned son in the 1985 screen adaptation of Horton Foote's play The Trip to Bountiful. Directed by Peter Masterson (the father of "Heaven Help Us" costar Mary Stuart Masterson), who was a cousin of Horton Foote, the drama about an elderly woman's wistful desire to revisit the town of her childhood earned Geraldine Page the Best Actress Academy Award. Carlin Glynn, Peter Masterson's wife, played Heard's wife in a cast that featured Rebecca De Mornay as a bus passenger Page befriends on her journey.

Geraldine Page shares a tender moment with John Heard
in "The Trip to Bountiful."

In 1988, John Heard found himself in the ensemble cast of Ruben Blades, Sonia Braga, Melanie Griffith, Daniel Stern, Christopher Walken, Freddie Fender, and M. Emmet Walsh for "The Milagro Beanfield War," depicting the Southwest standoff between Hispanic farmers and the developers of a proposed resort. The second film directed by Robert Redford, following his Academy Award-winning directing debut with 1980's Best Picture Oscar winner "Ordinary People," the colorful fable cast Heard as the local newspaper editor, a onetime 60s radical who just wants to cool down in the desert community.

Brazilian-born Sonia Braga and John Heard
costar in "The Milagro Beanfield War."

John Heard participated in a romantic triangle with Bette Midler and Barbara Hershey in the popular 1988 tearjerker "Beaches." The film, directed by Garry Marshall ("Pretty Woman"), featured Bette Midler's rendition of the power ballad "The Wind Beneath My Wings," which had been previously recorded by Roger Whittaker, Sheena Easton, Gladys Knight & The Pips, Lou Rawls, and Lee Greenwood. Midler's platinum-selling version went on to win Grammy Awards as Record of the Year and Song of the Year.

Bette Midler does not appear to be pleased caught between
John Heard and Barbara Hershey in "Beaches."

Heard worked with Garry Marshall's sister, director Penny Marshall, on two pictures as the 1980s drew to a close. In "Big," starring Tom Hanks, he played the unpleasant former boyfriend of Elizabeth Perkins, while in "Awakenings," with Robin Williams and Robert De Niro, he was an obstinately pragmatic doctor (pictured below).

Recalling his experience in "Big" for an interviewer, Heard broke into an impression of Penny: "John, why can't you ever do what I want you to do?" According to Heard, "I'd say, 'I want to be funny! Everybody else in the movie gets to be funny. I want to be funny.' She said, 'All right, all right, you're funny, you're funny.'"

These movies hinted at a new direction in John Heard's career as he portrayed more adversarial, snarky, if not outright antagonistic, characters. In the 1989 political thriller "The Package," he appeared as a creepy cloak-and-dagger colonel who gets dressed down by star Gene Hackman. That same year, in the miniseries "Cross of Fire," he played real-life Ku Klux Klan kingpin D.C. Stephenson, who, in the 1920s, was convicted of the abduction, rape, and murder of a state education official. Heard went all out as the full-blown sociopathic heavy in 1991's "Deceived," featuring Goldie Hawn as his terrorized wife. The script for "Deceived" was co-written by Mary Agnes Donoghue, who wrote the screenplay for "Beaches."

Spoiler alert for viewers of "Deceived": John Heard should be
wary of warehouse elevator shafts.

After his signature roles as the "Home Alone" dad in the early 1990s, John Heard self-acknowledgedly "just got fat." He laughingly admitted that after visiting his hospitalized, 94-year-old mother, who had just come out of a comatose-like state, he said, "'Let's take a picture,' so I took a picture on my iPhone...but then I said, 'Eh, my face is so fat in this picture.' And she said, 'Yeah, that's a problem you've had now for some years'...You want to know what happened to my career? Just ask my mother."

"My Fellow Americans," a 1996 political comedy that was supposed to team up Jack Lemmon with his perennial screen buddy Walter Matthau until the latter begged off due to health issues and was replaced by James Garner, found John Heard cast as a clone of the bumbling, clueless Dan Quayle-like Vice President to Dan Aykroyd's commander-in-chief (pictured below). Directed by "Tommy Boy's" Peter Segal, the generically sanitized satire featured an impressive supporting cast of players including Lauren Bacall, Wilford Brimley, James Rebhorn, and Esther Rolle. Sadly, all but Aykroyd and Brimley have departed.

In 1999, Heard portrayed Vin Makazian on "The Sopranos," a duplicitous New Jersey detective who fed information to Tony Soprano. Series star James Gandolfini went out of his way to get Heard on the series after the two ran into each other in a small Manhattan gym. "That's what I remember about that," Heard said. "And that they killed me." His character committed suicide by jumping off a New Jersey bridge after being arrested in a brothel raid.

Tony Soprano later learns that Vin Makazian had viewed him as
a friend, which leaves Tony depressed as he had always treated
Vin with disdain and never showed him any respect or kindness.

Heard related in an interview how he approached "The Sopranos" creator and executive producer David Chase, "and I said, 'Why me? I'm a detective! You can use me forever!' And he said, 'John, there's a rule in television: Somebody has to die that the audience likes.' I said, 'They like me? How do you know they like me?' He said, 'Well, they like you. So we're gonna kill you.'...The same thing happened to me on 'Prison Break.' I got the role of the governor...and then a handful of episodes, I hanged myself...After 'The Sopranos,' my mother said, 'Couldn't there be some raft floating under the bridge when you jumped? Or couldn't you have a twin brother?'" Regardless, John Heard was nominated for an Emmy Award for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Drama Series.

In 2013, John Heard enjoyed one of his favorite roles, George the likable barfly, in "Sharknado," the campy cult horror comedy that posits a freak cyclone striking Los Angeles and roiling water spouts that scoop up hungry sharks.

Even when fleeing the shark-infested bar, George retrieves
his habitual roost - his favorite barstool.

"This is going to be a huge hit," Heard remembered thinking. "This is going to put to rest the 'Home Alone' dad image. I'm going to be the 'Sharknado' drunk instead...But they didn't include me in 'Sharknado 2,' because - once again! - I died."


Coda

Come March 4 of this year, it'll be interesting to see if the prolific actor will be included in the Academy Awards' anticipated but unfailingly disappointing "In Memoriam" segment, or will he be snubbed in favor of, oh, perhaps...

George "The Animal" Steele

Actor, "Ed Wood"

or...

Erin Moran

Actress, "Galaxy of Terror"

The Last Word

When Daniel Stern dropped out of high school in Bethesda, Maryland, and moved to New York City to pursue an acting career, he ended up being taken in by roommates John Heard and Bruce McGill, who played D-Day in "National Lampoon's Animal House." By the end of his first day in the Big Apple, he recalled, "I was stoned and drunk...and had been adopted by my two older brothers." It was Heard who inspired Stern to become an actor in motion pictures, not just in theater.

John invited Daniel to a screening of "Between the Lines," where a "switch flipped" in the latter's mind. "Not only that it was possible to be an actor in movies," Stern noted, "but...HOW to be an actor in the movies. John was so real, so natural, so funny, so sexy, and so fearless. I saw how he brought himself to the screen, as well as the character, and the intimacy of the medium compared with theater acting. When I got my first movie, 'Breaking Away,' the only thing I knew about film acting was what I had learned from watching John do it."

Daniel Stern went on to act with Heard in "C.H.U.D." and "The Milagro Beanfield War," but even Stern, who, alongside Joe Pesci, played an inept burglar in "Home Alone," admitted he couldn't remember John being in the film. "We never had any scenes together," Stern explained, "and we only crossed paths on the set once or twice."

"John Heard was the coolest cat in New York City for about 10 straight years, 1974-1984," Stern wrote in a tribute. "Every actor wanted to be as intense as him...He lived life at 110 MPH...He was defiant, he was poetic, he was ridiculously generous and he was charismatic as hell."

Stern insisted that "nothing was more intense than John's performance in Life. He lived it hard, fast and fearlessly. He was a romantic and a raconteur. He was as loyal and generous as they come. He was a friend and a brother and a legend in his time."

Daniel Stern reunites with John Heard
several years after their halcyon days in New York City