Actors Who Looked "Old" for a LOOOONG Time

Cafe Society
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Recently we had a thread about Tom Selleck starting to look like Wilford Brimley, which lead to a discussion of his career, and something about Abe Vigoda, who seemed to be old forever. I thought we ought to have a thread just about people who seemed to be playing aged characters for a very long time. Sometimes they started playing “old” when they were young, but sometimes they got started late in life, and just kept on acting.
Burt Mustin – he’s the “poster child” (or, more accurately, “poster oldster”) for this trope. If you’re my age or a little younger, or you watch a lot of reruns of “classic TV”, you probably know the face, if not the name. He started out acting in 1951 at the age of 67 and kept on going until his death in 1977. With his tall, thin, beak-nosed, balding, thin-necked look, he appeared to be extremely aged when he started out, but he just kept on going, appearing in lots of TV shows, and even being a regular on some – He was “Gus the Fireman” in 15 episodes of “Leave it to Beaver”, Jud CRowley in 14 episodes of “Andy Griffith”, Justi Quigley in 4 episodes of “All in the Family”, and Arthur Lanson (his last role) in four episodes of “Phyllis”. He also appeared several times on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show.

Walter Brennan – Brennan didn’t look that old when he appeared as a bicyclist in The Invisible Man (1933) , but he was old every other time I saw him (Nevertheless, he had a long career, going back into the silent. He DID look young, once.). He played the rummy, perpetually drunk companion of Humphrey Bogart in To Have and Have Not in 1944, when he was 50. I first remember him as Grandpa Amos in the TV series The Real McCoys, when he was in his 60s. I also remember him from The Guns of Will Sonnett, when he was well into his seventies. I’ve got recordings of him reading from Mark Twain’s worth at some unspecified age, but he sure as heck sounds like an old man. He was 80 when he died in 1974

Abe Vigoda – like many who posted, I remember him first from The Godfather (1972), when he was all of 51 (although he’d been in films since 1949). Only two years later he went on to play Detective Fish on Barney Miller, where his schtick was that he was “old”, even though he only went from 53 to 60 in real life over the course of the show. He had a long career after that, appearing as late as 2014 when he was 92. He died two years later.

Wilford Brimley – He was almost always wearing that walrus moustache, which helped him look old (although he didn’t have it in John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982)). Brimley born in 1934, and has been appearing in films since 1969 (he had a small part in the first version of True Grit). I don’t recall that, and I never watched The Waltons, but I think every other time I’ve seen him he was The Old Crusty Guy, even though he was in his forties when I first saw him. He was only 50 when he played “Pop” Fisher in The Natural, and a year older when he played a character living in a retirement home in Cocoon. He wasn’t all that old when he was touting the dietary advantages of Quaker Oats. Brimley’s still around and, as of two years ago, acting. He’s 86.

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Pat Morita was only 52 when he played Mr. Miyagi. I was gonna say he looked “ancient” but maybe that’s not right, it’s just that the gray/balding hair made him look older. I assumed the character was supposed to be in his 70s.

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Wilfrid Brambel. Best known to American audiences as Paul’s Grandfather in A Hard Day’s Night. He was 52 at that time.

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I often tell people that in my retirement I am going to be an actor and strive to be my generation’s Burt Mustin. People my age know exactly who I am talking about. :smiley:

To add to your list, Harry Morgan (Col. Potter from M.A.S.H.) seems to fit the bill. Always, to me anyway, appeared to be middle-aged or older. I never remember seeing him as a young man.

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Steve Martin has had white hair forever.

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I think he looked fairly young in The Ox-bow Incident (1944) He was 30 at the time. I first remember him as my favorite character in December Bride, and its eponymous spinoff Pete and Gladys. I would call him early middle aged in those shows, and he was in fact 39 or so when December Bride started. He was 52 when he started Dragnet in 1967, and pretty much looked exactly that. So I think he was just an actor who got a little bit later start, and who wore well as he advanced from middle aged to older.

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Bea Arthur always seemed the same age no matter what point in her career. Though I know it’s not accurate, in my mind’s eye the pictures of her as Maude and Dorothy Zbornak are interchangeable.

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Agreed – he was balding with white hair when he was in Pete and Gladys(1960-82, a spinoff of a role he’s had on December Bride (1954-1959)), Kentucky Jones (1964-5), and in Dragnet '67 (and its increments). He looked pretty much the same when he appeared in the Dan Aykroyd/Tom Hanks movie Dragnet (1987).

I HAVE seen clips of him younger, with dark hair, but he always looked older in the TV shows and movies I grew up with.

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In the vein of Abe Vigoda, I always thought James Caan (who was 30-31 during filming of The Godfather) looked more like 40+ in that film. And it seems genetic–when I watched the Hawaii Five-0 reboot I was sure that Scott Caan had to be at least a decade older than Alex O’Loughlin. Come to find out, he was only one day older. Their faces seem to get lined and hard quite early.

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Louis Jones may be a special case. He started performing under the persona of “Grandpa” Jones when he was in his twenties. In this video from 1961, he would have actually been 48 years old.

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Harry Dean Stanton might qualify.

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White Hair, yes, but he doesn’t look old. More important, he hasn’t played old for all the time he had white hair. He’s pretty obviously playing a “young” guy in the 1970s and 1980s and even beyond.

He could’ve parlayed that white hair into playing an “old” guy" at an early age and keeping that parrarent age forever, pulling a “Count St. Germain”*, but he didn’t.

*The REAL St. Germain, not Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s version.

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Andy Clyde – he started playing old men in his 20s and continued for the rest of his life. Clyde in the early 30s. Thirty years later.

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Ernest Borgnine has always looked like a beer-bellied unhealthy living 55-60 years old throughout his whole career to me.

ETA: one more: Max von Sydow has always looked old.

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I was watching Major League (1989 film) with my sister several weeks ago. Bob Uecker (former Major League Baseball player, actor, and MLB play-by-play announcer) portrayed Cleveland’s play-by-play man in the movie. I told my sister that Uecker still does play-by-play in real life for the Milwaukee Brewers. She noted how old he looked even in 1989! Afterwards I looked him up on Wikipedia, and he was born in 1934, so he was only about 55 at the time the movie came out.

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Harry Morgan certainly didn’t look old in The Well, probably his best movie.

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Angela Landsbury was only 38 when she played Lawrence Harvey’s (35) mother in The Manchurian Candidate…and it wasn’t because Harvey looked young for his age.

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When James McDaniel was playing Lt. Arthur Fancy on “NYPD Blue,” he seemed to be in his early/mid 50s. He was 35.

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Borgnine always looked middle-aged which is a different category but we can expand the scope of this thread to include it. Along with Borgnine, I would add Gene Hackman and Walter Matthau to the ranks of the perpetually middle-aged looking.

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Similarly in The Big Clock (1948), in which Morgan played the thug/muscleman/enforcer role. He was about 33 and was effective in the part.
A lot of this phenomenon, in general, is down to productions or studios or insurance companies preferring to hire younger, rather than older, performers. If you can get a 50-year-old to play the role of an 80-year-old, you will (theoretically) have fewer issues with the performer needing time to rest or being easily injured.

So specialists arose in the business. Some of them were so well-regarded that they were able to go on playing 80-year-olds even when they themselves approached that age.