I’m looking for the name of the actor, character and movie in which someone smokes like a chimney. Hopefully, we will come up with the name of the person who should have died of lung cancer before the movie was released by the studio.
For example
Humphrey Bogart, Rick Blaine, Casablanca
Mel Gibson, Porter, Payback
William B. Davis was the Cigarette Smoking Man on X-Files.
Not dead.
Popeye, Sailor, many titles
Any Tarantino character.
Matthew McConaughey, Rusty Cohle, True Detective
Woody Harrelson, Officer Brown, Rampart
Catherine Tramell, Sharon Stone, Basic Instinct
keanu Reeves, John Constantine, Constantine. Dying of lung cancer was actually part of the plot.
Everyone in Good Night, and Good Luck.
Billy Bob Thornton’s barber Ed Crane in the Coen Brothers film The Man Who Wasn’t There.
Roy Scheider, Joe Gideon, All That Jazz
To be fair, Davis the actor had quit smoking years before being cast and asked not to be made to smoke tobacco. His ciggies were made from herbs or something.
In “Capote”, the actress who played Harper Lee always had a cigarette.
Ms. Lee is currently pushing 90 years old.
Everyone in the Flight Command Center in Apollo 13 was chain-smoking up a storm. Ironically, while the astronauts themselves didn’t smoke, Jack Swigert (played by Kevin Bacon) died from lung cancer in real life.
Clint Eastwood as Blondie in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.
Robert De Niro, Jack Walsh, Midnight Ru
James Bond deserves mention.
This was the first thought I had. I don’t know if Matthew McConaughey smokes IRL, but I don’t see how an actor could smoke like he did in that show and not get hooked. Yikes!
.
Elliot Gould as Phillip Marlowe in “The Long Goodbye”. I don’t think he’s ever NOT smoking in that movie.
Mconaughey is precisely infamous for smoking… something. In any case, I remeber an interview with John Hamm in Conan when he admitted that, because of regulations, the cigarettes in the show were herbal fakes, complaining about the foul taste.
Eileen Ryan, who played Gladys, in Eight Legged Freaks. Smoking was kind of a plot point, since the hero needs a book of matches at the climax.
Not a movie character, but I think Selma Diamond on “Night Court” deserves a mention. I recall one episode where she talked about buying an exercise bike, and someone asked her how far she rode every day. Her response was something like “I don’t know - I took off the speedometer to make room for the ashtray.”