You know, I was actually thinking about watching The Freshman last night. I was kind of going through my movies thinking, “Hmm, something in English that’s just enjoyable.” Not all of Jon Polito’s movies would have fit in that category—for one, the poor man was in Atlas Shrugged Part I—but a lot of them were. And while you might not have remembered at the time you started that he was in them, you definitely recognized him when you got there. He was a total “Hey, It’s That Guy!”

And so 2016 deprives us of another. I’ve written about a couple of Hey, It’s That Guys this year, scattered among your Gene Wilders and your Alan Rickmans and your Bona Fide Music Legends. In a way, it’s more sad to me when they die, because it isn’t until then that anyone really seems to notice them. I mean, I own the Hey, It’s That Guy! book, in which Jon Polito appears, and that’s something. But as I was reading off some of Polito’s credits to Graham just now, his reaction was, “Yeah, he was a character actor.”

What a range of characters, too. Yes, all right, frequently the cranky cop. Occasionally the cranky gangster. But the way I got Graham to remember him was by reminding him of the, okay, cranky airfield owner in The Rocketeer. He worked five times with the Coens. He appeared at least once on most of the major TV dramas of the ’80s, and also on Dinosaurs. He had a character appear twice on Murder, She Wrote. He’s even in the Hoffman Death of a Salesman, along with John Malkovich and Charles Durning.

Okay, so he handled his firing from Homicide: Life in the Street badly, though from the sound of it, there was a lot more wrong than right in that situation. And my goodness but his Wikipedia page is short aside from what he’s been in. He’s just not someone that a lot of time and attention have been brought to; as I write this, I’ve gotten in before Wikipedia and IMDb have been updated to add his death, and I had to check other sources to make sure The Solute would not be falling for a hoax. (This is a thing that I always do; you’re welcome.) I can’t give you much in the way of heartwarming and/or whimsical anecdotes, because none seem to appear in either place.

IMDb does have some lengthy and interesting quotes from him, I suspect from the Random Roles he did with Nathan Rabin five years ago. I’m not sure if he reached Stephen Tobolowski levels of interesting, my new bar, but interesting nonetheless. And certainly he’d been around; he made 73 movies (well, one is listed as being in pre-production, so probably 72), and he was on well over a hundred TV shows. Even people who didn’t recognize him will probably miss him without noticing.