Hector Elizondo The Taking of Pelham One Two Three

Hector Elizondo (born December 22, 1936) plays Mr. Grey (Giuseppe Benvenuto) in The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974), the most volatile of the four hijackers. Where Robert Shaw's Mr. Blue is controlled and Martin Balsam's Mr. Green is nervous, Elizondo's Grey is the one who seems capable of killing someone for the pleasure of it. The performance works through stillness -- Elizondo plays the menace as calm rather than manic, which makes the eruptions worse.

Elizondo built the character's danger out of placidity

In a 2016 interview for the Kino Lorber Blu-ray release, Elizondo described an approach that was counterintuitive for a villain role. He chose to subtract rather than add.

"I knew to leave myself alone and let the story handle the hard edges." — Hector Elizondo, HighDefWatch (2016)

"The story was very clear and the character was very clear. The more placid he seemed to be, the more dangerous he could be." — Hector Elizondo, HighDefWatch (2016)

The result is a performance that operates on a different frequency than the rest of the ensemble. Shaw is professional. Balsam is anxious. Elizondo is something else -- a man who does not appear to be afraid and who therefore cannot be predicted.

"There was this sense that he wasn't afraid of anything and that he wasn't afraid to die." — Hector Elizondo, HighDefWatch (2016)

The Cinephilia & Beyond retrospective captured the character in shorthand: "a psychotic operator cast out by the Mafia." Grey has been expelled from organized crime for being too uncontrollable -- a detail that makes his presence in Blue's disciplined squad a structural time bomb. (cinephilia & beyond)

Elizondo learned from Lee Marvin that villains never see themselves as villains

Elizondo's approach to Grey drew on a principle he credited to Lee Marvin. In an A.V. Club interview, he described how Marvin's philosophy shaped his understanding of antagonist roles:

"Bad guys" don't see themselves that way -- "They thought they had a job to do, that they were victims." — Hector Elizondo, The A.V. Club

Grey does not announce his menace. He harasses a hostage, baits Blue with "Blow it outta your ass, colonel," and kills the transit supervisor Dolowicz with calm efficiency. Every eruption is delivered from a baseline of placidity, which is what makes it register as eruption rather than sustained noise.

Walter Matthau gave him career advice on the Pelham set that he carried for decades

Elizondo and Walter Matthau overlapped on set for only a few scenes -- Grey and Garber occupy different spaces for most of the film -- but Matthau offered advice that Elizondo returned to throughout his career:

"Don't have a career. Have jobs... a career is like having a moving part. You can lose it... like your hair! But a job... If you're happy, you do a good job, and you can't lose it." — Walter Matthau (as recalled by Hector Elizondo), The A.V. Club

Matthau's instruction carried an implicit principle that Elizondo adopted: professionalism over stardom, craft over career management.

"If you're a good person, if you're professional, you'll be someone that people like to work with." — Hector Elizondo, The A.V. Club

A New York actor whose early career included ballet, baseball scouting, and an Obie Award

Elizondo was born on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, the son of Puerto Rican and Basque parents. Before he was an actor he was a child singer (appearing on the children's series The Adventures of Oky Doky), a conga player with a Latin band, a classical guitarist, a weightlifting coach, and a ballet dancer who trained at the Ballet Arts Company at Carnegie Hall from 1962 to 1963. A knee injury ended the dance career and redirected him to drama, where he studied under Stella Adler. (wikipedia, tvguide)

His breakthrough came with the off-Broadway play Steambath (1970), in which he played God disguised as a Puerto Rican steam-room attendant. The performance earned him an Obie Award in 1971. His Broadway credits include The Great White Hope (1968), Antony in Antony and Cleopatra at the New York Shakespeare Festival (1972), and a replacement run as Mel Edison in Neil Simon's The Prisoner of Second Avenue (1973). He received a Drama Desk nomination for Sly Fox (1977), opposite George C. Scott. (broadwayworld)

He understood what the subway meant as a location -- not just a set but a system that defined how New Yorkers moved through the city:

"The Taking of Pelham One Two Three couldn't have been done anyplace else." — Hector Elizondo, HighDefWatch (2016)

See New York City as Setting (The Taking of Pelham One Two Three) for how the film uses the city as more than backdrop.

Elizondo appeared in every film Garry Marshall directed

After Pelham, Elizondo built a career that moved between film, television, and stage without settling in any one medium. His most durable professional relationship was with director Garry Marshall, who cast him in all eighteen of his feature films beginning with Young Doctors in Love (1982). The partnership started with a basketball injury:

"We met finally in 1978 on his basketball court, where he pitched me his first movie. I had inadvertently hit him in the face with a basketball pass." — Hector Elizondo, Variety (2016)

His role as hotel manager Barney Thompson in Pretty Woman (1990) became his most recognizable film performance. Marshall's direction was characteristically minimal: "He told me to create the guy you'd like to work for." Elizondo won an Emmy for Chicago Hope in 1997 for the episode "Bridge Over Troubled Watters." (variety, wikipedia)

His philosophy of acting remained consistent with Matthau's advice:

"I love it when it's right and you hit the ball in the sweet spot. It's transformative. Especially when you're telling a story and you're feeling the audience." — Hector Elizondo, Television Academy