Movies

NEW YORK — There is no such thing as a Richard Jenkins movie, although he's been in more than 70 of them.

Even in his best-known role — as the mortuary paterfamilias, Nathaniel Fisher, on the HBO series Six Feet Under — Jenkins was dead, haunting the characters from the margins, a figment of their inner lives.

In Six Feet Under, he recurred in unpredictable intervals, giving scenes instant texture. So too in his film career, which has seen directors use him repeatedly as ballast for other people's star turns, as detectives and lawyers and dads, both in heavy drama and light comedy.

See him as a gay field agent for the Bureau of Tobacco, Alcohol and Firearms in David O. Russell's Flirting With Disaster. See him, as did writer-director Tom McCarthy, in the Richard Gere-Jennifer Lopez romance Shall We Dance, where Jenkins played a private detective hired by Susan Sarandon's character to spy on her husband.

McCarthy has given Jenkins the first lead role of his long movie career, as a widowed economics professor named Walter Vale in The Visitor, opening Friday.

The film marks the first time someone has showcased Jenkins' dry, even ordinary qualities as more than a countervailing note in a larger, more hectic world.

The Visitor is about Walter's growing entanglement with a young immigrant couple duped into renting an East Village apartment he owns but rarely occupies.

Oddly for Hollywood, Jenkins seems — just now, at 60 — to be hitting his movie prime.

"Look at me," he said, asked if he had to age into movie roles. "What was I going to play when I was 30?"

One agent told him to think "hit man" parts.

The older he got, though, the more he worked. And the path that he eventually found, this longer, less predictable road, has left him saying today: "Yeah, Hollywood's pretty cool, actually."

Jenkins has lived outside Providence for more than 30 years. Only once did he move — a 10-month stay in Los Angeles, in 1975, when Jenkins started to worry about money after his first child was born. He lived over a carport and paid $35 to audition for film and TV parts.