Lance Henriksen

Jeff has declared January the month of actor Robert Shaw at Aún Estamos Vivos, and that inspired me to nominate January at Perspective as the month of four actors whose work I like .... the first installment shall be about Lance Henriksen. Though most people may not recognize his name, Henriksen has been in many movies as a character actor, perhaps the most well known being The Terminator, though he also had parts in movies as diverse as those from The Right Stuff and Dog Day Afternoon to Pumpkinhead and Alien vs Predator.

First a bit of background on him from Wikipedia ....

Lance James Henriksen (born May 5, 1940) is an American actor, painter, and potter. Henriksen was born in Manhattan, New York City to a poor family. His father was a Norwegian merchant sailor and boxer nicknamed "Icewater" who spent most of his life at sea. Henriksen’s mother struggled to find work as a dance instructor, waitress, and model. His parents divorced when he was only two years old and he was raised by his mother. As he grew up, Henriksen found himself in trouble at various schools and even saw the inside of a children's home. Henriksen left home and dropped out of school at the age of twelve; he would not learn to read until he was 30, when he taught himself by studying film scripts. He spent most of his adolescence as a street urchin in New York. Riding on freight trains across the country, he would also do time in jail for petty crimes such as vagrancy. It was during this period of wayfaring that he met lifetime friends James Cameron and Bruce Kenselaar. Henriksen's first job in the theater world was as a designer of theatrical sets; in fact, he received his first role because built the set for the production. In his early 30s, Henriksen graduated from the prestigious Actors Studio and began acting in New York City's Off-Broadway theater circuit ...

And here's a bit about a couple of his characters I especially liked ....

- The android named Bishop in Aliens.

Though I'd noticed Henriksen in The Terminator, the first movie in which he really stood out for me was one of my all time favorites, Aliens. The film, a 1986 sequel to Alien, was directed by James Cameron and starred Sigourney Weaver, Michael Biehn, Bill Paxton and Paul Reiser, as well as Henriksen, who played the "artificial person" serving as the executive officer abord the Weyland-Yutani Corporation spaceship Sulaco. Here's a YouTube of the scene where Bishop is introduced. First he shows his abnormal dexterity in a knife game with Paxton's character, one of the marines on the ship, then he meets and is violently rejected by Wever's character, lieutenant Ripley ....




- And then there's ex-FBI agent turned freelance serial-killer profiler Frank Black in Millennium.

Millennium was a 1996 to 1999 tv series, a spin-off of The Ex-Files, created by Chris Carter and telling the tale of Frank Black (and his wife and small daughter) who moves to Seattle, Washington after leaving the FBI, to regain some mental health and to protect his family, but who ends up getting involved in investigating the strange and apocalyptic Millennium Group. The show dips into the religious horror genre, as well as straight crime, and some of the episodes were pretty creepy, but I always liked Frank Black - his integrity, courage, open-mindedness, and the great relationship he had with his little girl. It's said Carter based Black's character on real life FBI profiler and one-time head of the FBI's Behavioral Science Unit John E. Douglas.

There was a fun cross-over episode of the X-Files titled Millenium, set on December 21st 1999, where Mulder and Scully needed to contact Frank Black for some help with a case involving the Millenium Group. The story, involving necromancy, was about a number of dead FBI agents who were being resurrected from their graves as part of a plot to bring on armageddon on New Year's day 2000. Agent Scully reminded her partner Agent Mulder that the millenium would not actually occur until 2001, and he retorted that no one likes a math geek :) At any rate, they found Frank in an insane asylum and only with difficulty convinced him to help, just in time to save Mulder from being consumed by flesh-eating zombies (this stuff never gets old :) Here below is a YouTube of the tv trailer for the episode ....



Check out some of his movies.