Maury Chaykin

The Weight of Physical Presence

Maury Chaykin was born in Brooklyn in 1949, but his career belongs by right to the Canadian film industry. He was an actor of bulk and sharp glances, able to shift from tenderness to violent outburst in a matter of seconds. He studied drama at the University at Buffalo and soon after moved to Toronto to join the experimental theater scene of the 1970s.

There he founded a company and began building the kind of supporting profile that Hollywood always ends up calling for. His face started to get real attention thanks to WarGames in 1983.

He was never a conventional leading man, and he never pretended to be one. In 1990, he played Major Fambrough in Dances with Wolves, and his on-screen suicide left an image that viewers found hard to forget. That role gave him the decisive push to work with directors of the caliber of Atom Egoyan.

With Egoyan he shot The Sweet Hereafter in 1997, playing Wendell Walker. It was one of those restrained performances that show an actor's size doesn't define the subtlety of his work. But the industry also sought him out for pure comedy.

And it worked like a charm.

In My Cousin Vinny he played an eyewitness with bad eyesight, and in Mouse Hunt he handled the slapstick without breaking a sweat. His comic rhythm depended on the pause and on a irritability that was oddly magnetic. Because Chaykin knew his physique was a tool for controlling space.

The Orchid Detective

Television gave him the role of his life in 2000 as Nero Wolfe. Chaykin physically fit the literary description by Rex Stout, and he captured the mix of misanthropy and genius the script demanded. He shot two seasons of the series and several television movies playing the detective.

Despite his success in the United States, he always kept his base in Toronto. He preferred the calm of the Canadian system to the pressure of Los Angeles. So he balanced big productions with low-budget independent films right up to his final days.

His health began to decline due to kidney complications caused by diabetes.

In 2010, he was appearing in the series Less Than Kind, and his death coincided exactly with his sixty-first birthday. On July 27, 2010, the film world lost a man who filled the frame like few others. His last credited work was the film Barney's Version, released that same year.

Realism was always his trademark.

The production of the series he was working on had to rewrite part of the storyline to explain his absence in the third season. Chaykin recorded his final scenes just a few weeks before being admitted to a Toronto hospital. His contract stipulated a per-episode salary, which continued to be paid to help his family financially after his death.