The American film and TV actor Joe Turkel who has died aged 94, was best known for his roles as the ghostly Lloyd, the bartender in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, and as Dr Eldon Tyrell in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner in 1982.
He achieved the rare feat of being only one of two actors to feature in three of Kubrick’s movies. His career on-screen spanned four decades, beginning in 1949 and ending in 1990.
His final role was as the voice of Tyrell in the video-game version of Blade Runner in 1997.
In 1956, Joe Turkel was hired for a small part in what would become The Killing — a film about a racetrack heist. It was the first of three he would play for Kubrick.
When they first met, Turkel asked the young director, “Where you from, Stanley?” “The Bronx”, he replied. “The Bronx? That’s the low-rent neighbourhood!” Joe responded. So, Stanley asked him, “Where you from, Joe?” Brooklyn, he said. “Brooklyn? That’s the no-rent neighbourhood!”
Turkel then went on to feature in Kubrick’s next film, Paths of Glory, in 1957. It dramatised a true event from the First World War when the French military high command scapegoated five soldiers for the failure of a hopeless and impossible attack on a fortified and impregnable German position known as “The Pimple” on the Western Front.
The men were then court-martialled and shot. Turkel played Private Arnaud, one of the condemned men.
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Turkel (left) with Stanley Kubrick and Jack Nicholson on the set of The Shining
Filmed outside Munich, during the production Turkel recalled one incident where Hans Stumpf, one of the technical crew who was ex-Wehrmacht, was talking about the war and how great Germany was.
He then demonstrated the technique of how to goose- step correctly — “right on the fucking stage, right there and I’m a Jew and Stanley’s a Jew and we looked at each other and I’m saying to myself, ‘This happened, and millions died, and Stanley I think thought the same thing and I said, ‘What do you think of this Stanley?’
"And he said, ‘Not good, let’s get back to filmmaking.’ And that was it.”
Turkel would not appear in another Kubrick film until 1980 when he played Lloyd, the ghostly and spectral bartender imagined by the stir-crazy Jack Torrance (memorably played by Jack Nicholson). Although only a small part, he stood out for his ghoulish manner and it has been immortalised in memes and popular culture far beyond the short duration of its screen time.
His work on The Shining caught the eye of Ridley Scott and two years later, Turkel would feature in his Blade Runner as the hubristic creator of golems, Dr Eldon Tyrell. Based on the novel by Philip K. Dick, the character was originally called Eldon Rosen, pointing to this underlying Jewish resonance.
Whether he meant to or not, Dick’s choice of this family name is explicitly Jewish although this was toned down for the resulting film.
Indeed, many would not have known that Turkel was a Jewish actor as he was not really known for playing such roles.
However, he did play an uncredited Haganah soldier in Sword in the Desert (1949) as well as act in two films by the Jewish director Samuel Fuller, Fixed Bayonets (1951) and Verboten! (1959).
In The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre in 1967, he played the real-life gangster Jake “Greasy Thumb” Guzik, Al Capone’s most trusted adviser.
Eight years later he played an uncredited role in the film adaptation of Neil Simon’s The Prisoner of Second Avenue (1975) alongside Jack Lemmon.
Joe Turkel was born into a working-class Polish-Jewish immigrant family in Brooklyn. He had two brothers, Harold and David. His father, Benjamin, was a tailor, and his mother, Gazella Goldfisher, was a homemaker and occasional opera singer.
He joined the US merchant marines in 1944 and saw active service in Europe during the Second World War before joining the army in 1946. After receiving an honourable discharge, he briefly returned to New York for acting classes before heading to Hollywood in 1947.
His first credited role was in City Across the River (1949), a film about a programme for juvenile delinquents that also featured a young Tony Curtis.
In 1955 he married Anita Josephine Cacciatore in California and they remained together until her death. They had two sons, Craig and Robert.
He went on to become a prolific actor, amassing more than 100 credits in such films as King Rat, The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre and Village of the Giants, and with roles on popular television shows such as Bonanza, Ironside and Fantasy Island.
Nonetheless, Turkel never quite achieved the fame his acting deserved, and he was condemned to the grinding routine of auditioning for roles. Despite being a critical success, Blade Runner was not a financial one and after decades in Hollywood Turkel decided to retire.
Apart from a few minor film and TV parts he never acted again. He wrote a memoir with the bittersweet title The Miseries of Success and there are plans to release it later this year. He became a regular guest on the fan-convention circuit.
Turkel died of liver failure in Saint John’s Health Center in Santa Monica, California and is survived by his sons, Craig and Robert, his brother David and two grandchildren, Ben and Sarah. His wife Anita predeceased him.
Joe Turkel: born July 15, 1 927. Died June 27, 2022
