Actor Joe Turkel, best known for his outstanding roles in “The Shining” (1980) and “Blade Runner” (1982), died at the age of 94 on Monday (6/27) in California. The news was revealed on Friday evening (7/1) by a representative of the artist in a press release. The cause of death was not disclosed, but the actor was admitted to St. John’s in Santa Monica.
He has participated in more than 100 films and series, in a career that began at the height of the film noir cycle in the late 1940s, almost always in the role of secondary henchman.
It was in a noir that Turkel began his collaboration with Stanley Kubrick, playing a shooter in the culminating shooting of “The Great Heist” (1956). He enjoyed playing him in the small role and was asked to play a larger role in the war drama “Glory Made in Blood” (1957), as a soldier sent to the firing squad. This was Turkell’s favorite work, who considered Kubrick’s work to be the best film of his career.
The skinny man, born in Brooklyn in 1927, born in New York, continued making film noir until the genre went out of style and then played gangsters on television. He played five different henchmen in “The Untouchables” series alone, between 1960 and 1963. And then he was remembered by Roger Corman as one of the mobsters in “The Chicago Massacre” (1967).
Another famous director he worked with was Robert Wise, who cast him in “The Gunner of the Yangtze” (1965), opposite Steve McQueen, and in the disaster film “The Airship Hindenburg” (1975).
Kubrick called him in 1980 to play the ghost bartender in “The Shining” (1980), which served fictional drinks to the delusional character of Jack Nicholson. With that participation, Turkel became one of the few actors to work with the celebrated director three times.
Turkel only participated in two scenes in “The Shining”, but said 96 words and spent weeks working on the production, sometimes more than 13 hours a day. In Dennis Fischer’s Science Fiction Film Directors (2000), he said he asked Kubrick why he asked for the seventeenth take of an actor just walking down a corridor. “I worked four years to prepare this film, I want it to be fucking perfect,” was the answer.
The impact of “The Shining” in theaters convinced Ridley Scott that Turkel would be the perfect actor to play the cyber genius Eldon Tyrell, founder of the Tyrell Corporation and responsible for creating the replicants in the science fiction film “Blade Runner” (1982 ). He was once again a short but much more emblematic cameo, with surprising lines and a memorable death, crushed after a kiss by replicant Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer).
He returned to the role in the video game “Blade Runner”, released in 1997. Tyrell’s voice acting in the game was his last acting job.
Source: Terra
Camila Luna is a writer at Gossipify, where she covers the latest movies and television series. With a passion for all things entertainment, Camila brings her unique perspective to her writing and offers readers an inside look at the industry. Camila is a graduate from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) with a degree in English and is also a avid movie watcher.
