Dick Miller

Born on Christmas Day 1928 in the Bronx, Richard Miller belonged to a family of Jews who had recently emigrated from Russia. After serving in the Navy, he graduated with a degree in psychology from New York University. Determined to succeed as a screenwriter and writer, he moved to Los Angeles, where he was retrained as an actor when  Roger Corman  recruited him for the western  Apache Woman , with such a low budget that he had to play two roles, one of the townspeople and an Indian. “In an action scene one of my characters shoots the other”, he recalled with a certain sarcasm in an interview.

The director turned to him again for titles such as  The Oklahoma Woman ,  The Oracle Sheriff ,  They Conquered the World ,  Naked Paradise ,  Emissary from Another World ,  The Undead ,  Atlas ,  The Obsession ,  The Man with X-rays in his Eyes ,  The Hell’s Angels ,  The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre ,  The Journey   , and  Little Shop of Horrors , where he was a flower-eating patron of the establishment. It shines above all in the director’s film  A Bucket of Blood, where he gave life to the only protagonist of his career, a withdrawn waiter, Walter Paisley, who ends up kidnapping people to cover them in clay and sell them as statues.

He became a kind of fetish for  Robert Zemeckis ‘s first titles  ( Crazy About Them ,  Broken Brakes, Crazy Cars ), and filmmakers trained at Corman’s factory signed him for cameos, such as  Martin Scorsese  (who in  New York, New York  made him the owner of a club, and that also took him out in  Jo, what a night ) and  James Cameron  (who recycled him into an arms salesman who serves  Arnold Schwarzenegger , who later kills him in  Terminator ).

But above all, Joe Dante took advantage of him  , marked in his youth by the aforementioned  A Bucket of Blood , so he gave him a character also named Walter Pasley in his debut film,  Those Crazy Movies . Since then he never filmed without him, as he took him out again in  Piranha ,  Howls , his segment of  In the limits of reality ,  Explorers ,  The prodigious chip ,  You will not kill… the neighbor ,  Matinee ,  Little warriors ,  Looney Tunes: Again in Action ,  3D Fears , and  Burying the Ex. Of all his joint titles, he is remembered above all for  Gremlins , where he was Murray Futterman, the protagonist’s neighbor who suffers paranoia from foreign objects, and who will name the sinister creatures in the film. The character reprises, on vacation in New York, in  Gremlins 2: The Next Generation .

Throughout his life,  Dick Miller  never stopped working, apace. He was also an army officer in  Steven Spielberg ‘s 1941 flop  , and became very popular with television viewers as the owner of the bowling alley where the  Fame boys would hang out . He was  cast in Quentin Tarantino ‘s Pulp Fiction ,  but his character was cut in the editing room because the film was going to run too long. He leaves pending release the horror film  Hanukkah , by Eben McGarr.

Considered a cult actor by fans of fantastic cinema, in 2014 a young filmmaker Elijah Drenner launched a crowdfunding campaign to raise funds to shoot a documentary about his life. He received massive fan support, resulting in  That Guy Dick Miller , which traces his life, and his extensive career, having appeared in over 170 films.

The actor is survived by his wife, Lainie Miller, whom he married in 1959.