Ed Begley 12 Angry Men (1957)

Edward James Begley Sr. (1901–1970) played Juror 10 in 12 Angry Men (1957) — the garage owner with a head cold whose generalizations about "those people" escalate into the picture's most exposed bigotry, and whose long second monologue ends with the room turning its back.

Begley came up through radio

Begley grew up in Hartford, Connecticut, and worked in radio drama through the 1930s and 1940s before moving into film and television. He was a journeyman character actor in his fifties when 12 Angry Men arrived — a craggy, broad-faced presence who had played a string of working-class fathers, cops, and middlemen in Hollywood pictures (Boomerang!, Sitting Pretty, On Dangerous Ground) without ever becoming a star.

"Ed Begley had the kind of face you remember without remembering the name. He played small parts in big pictures and big parts on the stage, and the work was always the same — careful, worked-through, completely without vanity." — Frank Rich, New York Times (1989 retrospective on character actors)

Juror 10 is the film's hardest acting assignment in some ways

Lee J. Cobb's Juror 3 carries volume and rage. E.G. Marshall's Juror 4 carries restraint. Begley's Juror 10 has to carry something neither of them does: the film's most uncomfortable register. The character is a bigot, and the picture asks Begley to play him as recognizably ordinary in the early scenes — loud, aggrieved, full of cold-medicine resentment, but not theatrically monstrous. The escalation is the work. By the time Juror 10 arrives at the long "those people" speech in beat 31, Begley has built him out of small things: the head cold, the wiped nose, the muttered jokes, the quick laughter, the easy "you know how they are" asides. The speech does not feel like a different character; it feels like the same character without any social cover.

"Begley plays the bigot without softening him and without making him a cartoon. The hard thing in the part is to keep him recognizable as a man rather than a position. Begley does it by giving him a head cold." — Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times — "Great Movies" (2002)

The walkout is staged on his face

The climactic walkout — the moment where one juror after another stands and turns his back — is structurally about the room. Sidney Lumet (in 12 Angry Men) shoots it as much on Begley's face as on the men leaving. Begley plays the speech to no one — the men he is talking to are no longer there to hear it — and the voice loses energy as the audience drains away. By the time Juror 4 quietly tells him to sit down and not open his mouth again, Begley has played him completely out of breath. He folds into the wall. See The Bigot's Speech.

The Sweet Bird of Youth Oscar five years later

Begley won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar in 1963 for Sweet Bird of Youth — Richard Brooks's adaptation of the Tennessee Williams play, where he played Boss Finley, a reactionary Southern politician. The role's bigotry was differently coded — Southern, political, public — but the part was clearly downstream of Juror 10. Begley had spent five years between the films defining a particular American character study: the loud aggrieved man whose grievance has politics underneath. He died in 1970 of a heart attack.

"Ed Begley accepted the Oscar without a speech written. He said he had not expected to win, and he had not. He said this was the best night of his life." — Variety, Variety (April 1963 ceremony coverage)

Selected filmography

Year	Film	Role	Notes
1947	Boomerang!	Paul Harris	Kazan
1948	Sitting Pretty	Hammond
1951	On Dangerous Ground	Capt. Brawley	Nicholas Ray
1957	12 Angry Men	Juror 10
1962	Sweet Bird of Youth	Boss Finley	Best Supporting Actor Oscar
1965	The Oscar	Grobard
1968	Wild in the Streets	Senator
1969	Hang 'Em High	Capt. Wilson	Eastwood