Allen Garfield, actor best known for The Conversation and Beverly Hills Cop II – obituary

Allen Garfield, who has died of Covid-19 aged 80, was a character actor who specialised at turning supporting parts into memorable roles; he appeared in more than 100 films and television shows, but was denied leads because his appearance was deemed not to match his talent.

Instead he made his characters – often venal or corrupt – seem authentic because they accepted who they were. In his own favourite film, Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation (1974), he played Bernie Moran, a wire-tapping rival to Gene Hackman’s Harry Caul, but unhampered by Caul’s crippling conscience.

He worked with Coppola again – in One From The Heart (1981) and in Cotton Club (1984), where he played Abbadabba Berman, the mob accountant whose signature line, “it’s nothing personal, just business”, was made memorable in The Godfather.

Garfield was born Allen Goorwitz on November 22 1939 in Newark, New Jersey to Philip and Alice Goorwitz. In high school he began amateur boxing, while working as a copy boy on the Newark Star-Ledger. “I was going to be a journalist-boxer, the Jewish Hemingway,” he said. But he was drawn to drama, and after he left school he studied acting at night in New York while working as a sportswriter and editor.

He got a place at the Actors Studio, where he studied under Lee Strasberg and Harold Clurman. He took the stage name Garfield in tribute to the Body And Soul star John Garfield, but his own first film role came in Orgy Girl 1969, in which, he was quick to point out, “There was no orgy!”

Three of Brian De Palma’s early films showed his talent for quirky comedy and began his pattern of repeat performances for appreciative directors. His first lead came in John Avildsen’s Cry Uncle, (1971) in which he played a short fat private detective who fancies himself a ladies man. “It was one of a kind,” he explained, when further leads did not materialise.

He did much episodic television; later in his career he played in a Faustian episode of Tales From The Dark Side. Robert Altman cast him in his seminal film Nashville, as the husband/agent of the emotionally fragile singer Ronee Blakely. “It was painful...” said Garfield. “Altman allowed me to take responsibility for my character: over-bearing, loving, bullying.”

After his parents died, Garfield dropped his stage name in their honour; he was billed as Goorwitz in some of his best work, starting with William Friedkin’s The Brink’s Job (1978), alongside character actor stalwarts Peter Falk, Peter Boyle and Paul Sorvino.

In Richard Rush’s The Stunt Man (1980) he plays the screenwriter foil to Peter O’Toole’s ego-maniacal director, “like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza”. Five years later, in Wim Wenders’s The State Of Things (1982), he reclaimed his stage name, at the urging of Shelley Winters. “Make life easy for yourself,” she said. “‘Garfield’ really suits you.”

He was billed as Garfield in Cotton Club and in the under-rated Desert Bloom (1986), as well as in the role for which he is most familiar today, the bombastic Chief Lutz in Beverly Hills Cop II (1987). “I love making a ton of money doing big pictures, but if I believe in a film, like Desert Bloom, which we did for hardly anything, I’ll do it.”

Garfield suffered a stroke in 1998, just before filming The Ninth Gate (1999), but its director Roman Polanski rewrote his role to incorporate his new partly frozen face. He then suffered a major stroke in 2004, after which he ceased acting and moved into the Motion Picture Home in Woodland Hills.

He had an unexpected final lead role, when Chief Zabu, a long-unreleased socio-political comedy which he made for almost nothing in 1986, was finally screened in 2016. Garfield plays a brash upwardly-mobile real estate tycoon who dreams of political power and achieves it by taking over a Polynesian island nation. The unwitting parallels to Donald Trump brought the film into the public eye, 30 years too late.

Allen Garfield, born November 22 1939, died April 7 2020