Why Rip Torn's Larry Sanders Show performance was so brilliant

Variety

The role of Artie the producer on the HBO comedy is "one that only an actor with the skill, the nuance, and the willingness to toggle between warmth and fearsomeness of Torn could pull off," says Daniel D'Addario of the performance that earned Torn six Emmy nominations and one victory. D'Addario adds: "Artie isn’t insincere — he genuinely seems to care about Larry’s well-being and his career success, and he sees with clear eyes how intertwined the two are. But he’s tactical, deploying the sides of his charisma that the moment calls for and going scarily dead when he must. We learn, over the course of the series, precious little about Artie other than his remarkable gift for keeping those who’d otherwise fall apart upright and working. As played by a veteran actor who’d surely met his share of Hollywood personalities, Artie is a creature of a vanishing industry, a company man in an era in which that’s falling out of fashion. If, indeed, the character is based in sum or in part on Tonight Show producer Fred de Cordova (an industry legend whose impact is not widely known to fans of Johnny Carson’s show), it’s a worthy testament to an era in which high-level entertainment was played backstage and out of the spotlight, with charm and a sportsmanlike love of the game."

ALSO:

• Judd Apatow shares his behind-the-scenes Larry Sanders images of Rip Torn: "One of the great privileges of my creative life was to watch the brilliant, mad, fireball Rip Torn work at The Larry Sanders Show."
• Check out more of Apatow's Torn images: "Once Rip said to me 'you’re a good soldier.' It was the nicest compliment I ever could have gotten from this man I was so in awe of."
• Rip Torn in a 2001 interview: "Garry Shandling always said to me, 'Don’t get mad, get funny.' It changed my life"
• Bob Odenkirk pays tribute to Torn: "He was gleeful in acting, it was fun to see up close"
• RIP @RipTornOutlives: Screenwriter Conor Sullivan mourns the loss of Torn -- and his now "obsolete" Twitter account