Joseph Sweeney 12 Angry Men (1957)
Joseph Sweeney (1884–1963), born in Philadelphia, played Juror 9 (McCardle) in 12 Angry Men (1957) — the oldest man in the room, the first switcher, and the juror whose late observation about the marks on the woman witness's nose triggers the film's structural climax.
Sweeney was the only cast member who carried the role over from the live broadcast
Sweeney had played Juror 9 in Reginald Rose's original 1954 Studio One teleplay, directed by Franklin J. Schaffner and broadcast live on CBS on September 20, 1954. When the film went into production three years later, eight of the twelve principal jurors were recast for screen names — Henry Fonda, Lee J. Cobb, E.G. Marshall, Ed Begley, Jack Warden, Jack Klugman, John Fiedler, and Robert Webber were all new — but Sidney Lumet (in 12 Angry Men) and Reginald Rose (in 12 Angry Men) kept Sweeney in the part. He is the only direct connection between the two versions. (wikipedia)
A long stage and live-television career
Sweeney had spent the previous fifty years as a New York stage actor, with credits going back to the 1910s. He worked steadily on Broadway through the 1920s and 1930s — The Royal Family, The Front Page, Tobacco Road — and moved into live television in the late 1940s as the medium became a refuge for older theater actors. By 1957 he was seventy-three years old and had spent the better part of a decade playing kindly old men in Goodyear Television Playhouse, Philco Television Playhouse, and Studio One episodes.
What Juror 9 does
Juror 9 has the smallest line count among the senior jurors but possibly the most structurally important role in the deliberation. Sweeney plays him as a careful watcher — the man who looks at the room before he raises his hand on the first vote (beat 3), who switches on the secret ballot in support of Juror 8's right to be heard (beat 13), who reframes the old man witness as "a quiet, frightened, insignificant" man who needed "to be quoted just once" (beat 17), and who in the climax raises the marks on the woman's nose (beat 35).
The line in beat 17 is one of the picture's most-quoted moments, and Sweeney plays it with no rhetorical flourish — a slow, careful description of a kind of loneliness he has clearly thought about. The performance is the picture's structural counterweight to Cobb's Juror 3: where Cobb's certainty is held together by rage, Sweeney's doubt is held together by attention.
"The old gentleman is the moral compass of the room. He is also the man whose powers of observation make the climax possible. Sweeney plays him as the kind of old man you don't see in films often — frail, but completely awake." — Bosley Crowther, The New York Times (April 15, 1957)
The eyeglass-marks reveal is structurally Sweeney's
The film's climax — Juror 4's flip in beat 37 — depends entirely on Sweeney's earlier line in beat 35. The case's last surviving leg, the woman across the street's testimony, is dismantled because Juror 9 noticed something during the trial that no one else noticed: marks on the sides of the witness's nose, the kind made by glasses worn habitually, when she was not wearing glasses on the stand. The information has been sitting in his head the entire deliberation. Sweeney plays the reveal as someone who has been waiting to be sure it mattered before saying anything. See Juror 9 and the Eyeglass Marks.
After 12 Angry Men
Sweeney made only one more film — Lonelyhearts (1958), in a small role — and continued to work in live television through 1960. He died in 1963 at seventy-eight. 12 Angry Men is the work he is remembered for.