Everett McGill

Dark featured and loomingly tall, Everett McGill was well suited to a career playing in dark, cult films. His deep-set eyes and prominent forehead were a perfect fit for Naoh, head cavemen in Jean-Jacques Annaud's "Quest For Fire." As Naoh McGill went under heavy prosthetics, preparing him well for his only other lead part which came seven years later in Monty Hellman's "Iguana," where he played a sailor with a disfigured face and tyrannical impulses. These roles were mile-markers on a career with a bizarre trajectory in which he often took on intense roles. McGill played a murderous reverend in the Stephen King adaptation of" Silver Bullet," a corrupt DEA agent in the Bond film "License To Kill," and a crazed Colonel in the comedy "My Fellow Americans." Not until after casting him in his 1984 adaptation of Frank Herbert's sci-fi classic "Dune," did David Lynch recognize McGill's gentler side, casting him in the 1990 night-time soap, "Twin Peaks." Here, McGill played a kindly mechanic in love with his high school sweetheart, though married to the one-eyed shrew, Nadine (Wendy Robie). Robie and McGill made a good pairing, and slasher king Wes Craven tapped them to play a duo of evil landlords a year later in "The People Under the Stairs." McGill career began in a soap opera, "Guiding Light," and his role in "Twin Peaks" was not much of a leap, nor was his reprised role as a friendly mechanic in Lynch's 1999 heart-wrencher "The Straight Story." His abrupt disappearance from acting in '99 is surprising due to his frequent work with the well-respected Lynch.