Cast and Characters (The Untouchables) The Untouchables

Principal Cast

Eliot Ness — Kevin Costner

A Treasury Department Special Agent sent to Chicago to enforce Prohibition, Ness arrives as a clean-cut idealist convinced that upholding the law means following it to the letter. His first raid destroys that conviction publicly: cops tipped off by Capone, a warehouse full of empty crates and Japanese umbrellas, the press recording every moment of failure. What the humiliation teaches him is that idealism without power amounts to theater, and the rest of the film tracks how far he will bend his principles to acquire the real thing. Kevin Costner plays Ness as a man whose rigidity is both his greatest virtue and his greatest vulnerability, incorruptible precisely because he has not yet been tested. By the end he has thrown a man off a roof and lied to a judge, leaving the film to ask whether the law he swore to uphold survived the man who enforced it.

Jim Malone — Sean Connery

An aging Irish-American beat cop who has survived decades on the Chicago force by keeping his head down, refusing every promotion that would put him on Capone's radar. Malone functions as the film's moral center, the man who tells Ness the rules of the real Chicago, where "he pulls a knife, you pull a gun" and where the only rule that matters is going home alive at the end of your shift. Sean Connery, who won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for this role, plays Malone as someone who has nursed a quiet fury at what Chicago became through an entire career, recognizing in Ness a chance to finally spend it. He recruits Stone at the police academy, teaches the team how to fight dirty, leads them to their first real liquor raid. His murder in his apartment is the film's emotional climax: Nitti's gunman blasts through the door with a tommygun,^b24 and Malone, mortally wounded, drags himself the length of his kitchen toward the wall phone, gripping Ness's collar to force the question one last time — "What are you prepared to do?!" — before gasping out the bookkeeper's whereabouts: "He's on this train."^b24

Al Capone — Robert De Niro

The most powerful man in Chicago, Capone controls the city's liquor supply, its police, its courts, its politicians. Robert De Niro plays him as a man who has mistaken power for charm, performing for the press, philosophizing about teamwork at a formal dinner with baseball metaphors, then caving in the skull of a disloyal lieutenant with the bat. De Niro appears in relatively few scenes, but each establishes that Capone's violence is theatrical rather than impulsive, designed to be witnessed and reported. His fury at Ness runs personal ("I want his family dead, I want his house burnt to the ground"), yet his downfall comes not from guns but from an accountant's ledger. In the courtroom — after Ness's bluff produces a fresh jury and his lawyer withdraws Not Guilty for a plea of Guilty — he is reduced to screaming "Is this justice?"^{b33 b34}

George Stone — Andy Garcia

Born Giuseppe Petri,¹ Stone changed his name to escape the stigma of Italian heritage in a city where Italians are assumed to be criminals. Andy Garcia plays him as the youngest and most capable member of the team, a sharpshooter at the police academy who earns Malone's respect by calling him a "stinkin' Irish pig" when Malone tests him with an ethnic slur. Stone is quiet and lethal, defined by action rather than speech. At the Canadian border raid he is part of the mounted ambush of Capone's liquor exchange;² at Union Station he makes the shot that saves the bookkeeper and the baby carriage, firing one-handed while sliding across the marble floor. He is the last Untouchable standing beside Ness at the end.

Oscar Wallace — Charles Martin Smith

A Treasury accountant sent from Washington, Wallace discovers that Capone has not filed an income tax return since 1926. Charles Martin Smith plays him as a bookish, nervous man who finds that he enjoys the tactical aspects of law enforcement "much more diverting than accounting." Wallace provides the legal strategy that will actually convict Capone, not the liquor raids but the tax case, the ledger that proves unreported income. Nitti murders him in the service elevator of the federal building as Wallace escorts the squad's captive accountant — the bagman captured at the Canadian-border raid and used to decode the seized ledger — out of the building. Wallace's body is found alongside the captive's with "TOUCHABLE" scrawled in blood across the elevator's metal interior — Capone's response staged as crossing out the "Untouchables" headline.^b19 His death devastates the team because it destroys both a man and a strategy in a single act.

Frank Nitti — Billy Drago

Capone's chief enforcer, Nitti is a silent, spectral presence for most of the film, appearing in doorways, watching from balconies, carrying out murders with professional calm. Billy Drago plays him as someone who treats killing as clerical work, dispatching Oscar Wallace and the squad's captive accountant in a service elevator, shotgunning Malone in his apartment, then appearing in court carrying a gun with a permit signed by the Mayor of Chicago. His taunting of Ness ("Your friend died screaming like a stuck Irish pig") provokes the film's most morally compromising moment. Ness throws Nitti off the courthouse roof and lies about it afterward, crossing the line that separates law from vengeance.

Catherine Ness — Patricia Clarkson

Ness's wife, who appears in domestic scenes that ground the film's escalating violence in the ordinary life he is risking. Patricia Clarkson, in her film debut, plays Catherine as someone who understands the danger her husband faces and supports him without asking him to stop. She is evacuated with their daughter after Capone's men threaten the family. Her phone calls from hiding, asking if he is all right, telling him about repainting the house, remind Ness and the audience of what normalcy sounds like when everything around it has turned to war.

Supporting Cast

Actor	Role	Notes
Richard Bradford	Chief Mike Dorsett	Corrupt police chief inside the Chicago department3
Jack Kehoe	Walter Payne	Capone's bookkeeper; captured at Union Station and testifies at trial
Brad Sullivan	George	Capone's bookkeeper captured at the Canadian-border raid; murdered with Wallace in the federal-building elevator at the midpointb16 b19
Del Close	Alderman John O'Shea	Capone's political fixer; attempts to bribe Ness
Kaitlin Montgomery	Ness's Daughter	Young daughter whose safety motivates Ness's most desperate moments