Paul Gleason, 1944-2006
Although his IMDB page lists some 131 film and TV roles, Paul Gleason will forever be remembered for playing three of the biggest assholes in cinematic history. In 1983, Gleason brought a real nastiness to Clarence "I'll rip out your eyes and piss on your brain" Beeks in Trading Places. Two years later he tackled what many consider his defining role, making The Breakfast Club's Principal Richard Vernon my generation's most iconically horrible authority figure. (And this character, along with Jeffrey Jones's Principal Ed Rooney in Ferris Beuller's Day Off and William Atherton's Professor Jerry Hathaway in Real Genius, forms the holy triumvirate of great administrative dickheads of 1980s cinema.) Then in 1988 he played the unfairly maligned Deputy Police Chief Dwayne T. Robinson in Die Hard. I actually kind of liked Dwayne. Plus he delivered the best line in the entire movie: "They're gonna need some more FBI guys, I guess."
If you look up "typecast" in the dictionary either Gleason or Bela Lugosi will be pictured, but the guy pretty much embodied petty authoritarian menace throughout my childhood. Ironically, "word on the street" is that we was a really great guy in "real life." Anyway, he died on Saturday of mesothelioma, which anyone who watches daytime TV will recognize from ambulance-chaser commercials as a rare, asbestos-related form of lung cancer. I call bullshit on such a cool guy dying from such a nasty disease, but what are you gonna do? Rest in peace, Paul Gleason, and may you spend every day in heaven knocking John Bender's dick in the dirt.
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