Mélanie Lussier became friends with Mike Walsh when he started camping at the family business, Lakewood Campground.
SWANTON Mike Walsh left Swanton in the 1950s to see if he could become an actor, but returned every summer long after he got his name on the marquee.
Franklin County actor M. Emmet Walsh died last Tuesday, March 19, at Northwestern Medical Center of cardiac arrest in St. Albans. He was 88 years old.
Walsh's body of work spans more than 50 years, but he is best known for his on-screen character work in the '80s and '90s, when he was hired to fill the role of an everyman jaded. But in reality, Walsh was a character in his own right, a self-described local boy gone bad who was usually ready with a quip and a $2 bill.
I believe that everyone who knew him or crossed his path will tell you that he left a lasting impression on them, declared Mélanie Lussier in a written message about Walsh.
Walsh spent his summers at his home in Franklin County, usually going to the Hog Island Market, Devyns Creemee Stand, or getting his hair cut at Karens Hair Studio. During the winters, he lived in Culver City, California.
He also loved sitting by the lake at his camp, listening to the birds, watching the train go by, and playing cribbage with his dear friend Dave. He was certainly a very accomplished man, Lussier said.
Small beginnings
Born in Ogdensburg, New York, Mike Walsh moved to Swanton with his parents and brother Harry in the 1940s. According to online interviews with Walsh, he said his parents grew up in St. Albans and that his father and brother worked as customs agents on the northern border.
Walsh, however, had the acting bug. After graduating from Swanton High School and then Clarkson College in business administration, he attended the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York, working in the city and learning the trade for seven years before turning professional.
Walsh's early acting career, however, focused largely on stage plays. In a 2011 interview, he recalled those years in New York watching famous '50s actors like Anne Bancroft and Syney Poitier and trying to figure out how they moved and spoke to achieve the desired effect. His first jobs were with stage troupes throughout New England.
By 1969, Walsh had moved to Los Angeles, and he made his debut both on screen (End of the Road) and on Broadway (Does the Tiger Wear a Tie?) that year. But he didn't gain his reputation as a benchmark for acting until 1984. At the time, two young people in their twenties had pitched a script called Blood Simple, and they wanted Walsh to play it. plays an important role after seeing him play an important role. off-putting probation officer in the 1978 film, Straight Time.
Walsh said he was filming Silkwood in Texas when he got his hands on the script for Blood Simple. He had started looking more closely at scripts personally after an agent dropped a few roles.
Walsh's breakthrough role as Loren Visser solidified his reputation as a character actor in Los Angeles. In the film, Walsh hides money on his person, which can be seen by the undersized yellow leisure suit chosen for the character. Walsh said in a 2017 interview about the role that he asked new directors Ethan and Joel Coen to pay him in cash, and that he had nowhere to keep the money safe except his home.
For the Coen brothers, now considered some of the best directors working, Blood Simple was their first film, and Walsh was cast as an off-putting, yellow-clad private detective named Loren Visser. They cast Walsh without an audition after writing the role for him, and the Coens then met him in Texas for filming.
I'm from Vermont. I'm a Yankee, I grew up speechless there, Walsh said in 2017, as part of a series of interviews with members of the production. How I ended up playing this southerner, I don't know how it all came together.
Walsh received $100 per day for filming, as well as a share of the gross profits. When the Coens offered him his first week's check, Walsh asked for money.
The collaboration, however, ended up solidifying the Coens' career, and for Walsh, he proved his ability to elevate dialogue and action, ultimately winning the Best Performance award with the Independent Features Project for bringing to life to the uncomfortable presence of Visser.
(Walsh) was one of the first people to take us seriously, for no reason,” Ethan Cohen said in a 2017 interview about the film.
When playing disturbing characters, Walsh said he never saw them as mustache-twirling villains, even if they were performing evil acts. Instead, he focused on their humanity first, adding quirks and strange mannerisms as he evolved the character. For these characters, Walsh said, they probably thought they were normal people doing normal things, but their circumstances skewed what they did.
Play ball
With over 200 film roles under his belt, Walsh is recognized by random people in Vermont. Stéphanie Gingras saw it happen. As the owner of the Hog Island Market, she said she wasn't familiar with Walsh's body of work, but he usually showed up throughout the summer ready to file a good-natured complaint mood regarding ice cream prices.
Sometimes a random market visitor's eyes would widen after noticing Walsh, so he'd pull out his Screen Actors Guild resume, which lists all of his work. He was carrying a few copies, Gingras said.
But Walsh didn't pretend to be a Hollywood celebrity. In public interviews, he often spoke about the importance of an actor knowing his strengths, and he found success by living up to what Hollywood expected of him on screen.
They don't want Emmet Walsh, he said in 2011. They want a police driver. They want a cop. They don't want a cop Emmet Walsh. I'm just trying to enhance myself.
Walsh's acting talent was very evident on screen, however. Critic Roger Ebert once wrote The Stanton-Walsh Rule praising Walsh for his work. If Walsh, or fellow actor Harry Dean Stanton, were in a movie, then Ebert could count on at least one scene to catch his attention, meaning the movie couldn't be completely bad.
In interviews, Walsh described his job as playing ball with another actor, and he was set up to return the ball to conserve energy. If a co-actor couldn't keep up, then Walsh could steal the scene.
If he didn't do his job, I would kill them, I would kill this guy. The camera would never look at him again, he said in 2017.
Soon, Hollywood had Walsh on the short list of actors to call when a scene needed a boost. There were about 10 in the Hollywood system a few decades ago, he said.
As Walsh grew older, his roles evolved. Since his face had become the cultural symbol of private detectives, police officers, bus drivers, garbage collectors and almost every dirty job, Walsh continued to work late in life.
He also began getting more roles suited to his older face, such as those of grandfathers and eccentric elders. In the 2018 Hallmark movie Shifting Gears, for example, he plays a former gas station employee who came with the building.
Back in Franklin County, Gingras said Walsh looked into this grumpy character during his visit to the Hog Island Market. He always carried new $2 bills with him to hand out to the kids when he came to buy ice cream and popsicles.
I think that’s who he was and what he was like,” Gingras said.
Taken in 2007 by a Messenger employee who lived in Swanton, the photo shows Walsh saving a snapping turtle from being run over on State Route 78.
As he grew older, Walsh showed up less and less at the market, but Gingras said she always knew when he was there because he could always make his presence known, whether in real life or on stage or on the big screen.
You never know when it's going to end, Walsh said in 2017 after talking about his past career. I don't know how to stop (playing). That's what I've done all my life. I liked that. I had fun. If it had happened otherwise, there would have been two or three ex-wives and five children and I would have nothing. But you win some and you lose some.
