Elisha Cook

Originally from vaudeville and the Broadway stage, Cook, who briefly entered films in 1929 before returning to the stage, made a strong impression with his definitive sniveling gunsel in "The Maltese Falcon" (1941), and followed with similar roles as weaklings or sadistic loser-hoods: Harry Jones in "The Big Sleep" (1946) and George Peatty in Stanley Kubrick's "The Killing" (1956) over a more than sixty-year career.