Best Supporting Actors

I've always loved supporting actors. The best of them can steal a film entirely: Dorothy Malone seducing Humphrey Bogart in a bookshop in The Big Sleep (the sexiest scene in the entire history of the cinema: fact), Dennis Hopper taunting the men who are about to kill him in True Romance (the best scene Quentin Tarantino ever wrote?).

died last week. You won't have heard of him. He played the elegant member of the team of conmen in The Sting. He gets to deliver one of the film's best lines, one that was used in the trailer, and I can quote it from memory. One of the team warns him (talking of the Paul Newman character): 'If this thing blows up, I can't do you no good downtown. Gondorf's federal now.' To which Gould's character, Kid Twist, replies: 'Dukie, if this thing blows up, the feds will be the least of our problems.'

Apart from The Sting, Gould did lots and lots of TV, but I'd swap that scene, that line, for Warren Beatty's whole career (well, perhaps McCabe and Mrs Miller excepted).