[05/21/2026][ESSAY]Michael Murphy, ’70s Actor
by China Bialos
There’s a moment after Bill Boggs shows his audience a clip from what he mistakenly refers to as The Big Bank Hoax, a moment where he turns to Michael Murphy and says, “You’re very convincing as a priest—I would confess to you,” and then immediately he pivots to a young John Hurt and says, “Good luck in Hollywood,” and god it’s a sign of a time.
I wasn’t alive when those well wishes were still meaningful but I’m alive now and enthralled with Michael and this clip is a small proof of life, one of a few.
It takes all sorts of searching to dig up the goods. The first prediction prompted is What’s happened to Michael Murphy? My search engine, obscuring him like hell, is hard at work building a story around Navy Lieutenant Michael Patrick Murphy, buried since 2005.
No. The Michael I’m after is now eighty-seven. The Michael I’m after lives in a town christened by King Charles I, a town whose residents have decidedly gone blue since the year Bob Dole attempted to overtake Bill Clinton, and it’s home to an honest-to-god lighthouse, something I’ve only seen in movies.
***
Once upon a time he was I’m not ready for this version of him.
Once upon a time he was a Marine. I don’t pine for that man. He went to university at a reputed party school and moved to Los Angeles to teach English at a high school that loads of my cultural reference points once graduated from. My favorite composer, a dead punk, a divorced punk. The actor who starred in two of my favorite campy movies nearly twenty years apart. The long-dead guitarist and his living half-sister, who graduated one generation after the other. I’m not sure Michael taught any of these people about the canon.
He’s got 114 credits! says the industry but I’ve only seen him in nine performances and if I’m honest I only remember five of them because they always use him as a vehicle to nudge things along. My first memory of him might be from more than thirty years ago, failing to reign things in as the Mayor of Gotham City. But he wasn’t on my radar then. I don’t remember offhand whether his hair was brown or white in 1992—the child version of me wouldn’t have latched onto him, or to a political role. Nor did I realize a year later I was watching his then-wife on screen as a mother forced to decide which of two preteen heartthrobs to drop over the side of a cliff when an arm’s strength could only save one. She’s now in love with a woman because she’s allowed to be.
I only know Michael for his history of playing weak men because I’ve done my best to ignore most of the war dramas and the movies where his Catholic looks got him cast as a politician or a priest. I’ve narrowed his best performances to those of men who get involved with women who aren’t his wife. I’ve got no real memories of his dialogue, only that he’s cried, hesitated, and moaned through an ulcer. I pine for these men. I pine for the blacklisted writer in a blazer—the communist sympathizer, directed by a real communist, surrounded on set by real communists. I pine for the man who joins a seance, fucks his girl in a van, and dies at the hands of Count Yorga. The man who doesn’t know this is a horror film. The man who’s thirty-two and just getting started.
When I was finally, firmly cemented as an adult, he was a man old enough to play the role of what comes next, and he sat in a nursing home, whimpering in a wheelchair alongside a wife who belonged to someone else until she didn’t. I replay this in my head—not the scenes themselves, but the act of watching the scenes. This is a transition I’m not prepared for. Michael’s suddenly old enough to portray dementia on screen but it’s only 2006 and he has a lot of life left in him and he’s still several years from divorce I’m not ready for this version of him. If this is how it’s going to be then this is the last one I’ve got in me.
He whimpers his way to the end and gets a girl along the way and my god they made him mute? He’s barely there, just there to be the vehicle who frees up Olympia Dukakis to fuck a bear of a man. A bear of a man who was once Babar and is now dead. They only had two hours to spell it out but did they get it right, the potential for incontinence and neglect and the fear that comes with having no choice but to start over? Did they capture the regression into stuffed animals and sweets and television with no grasp of ten minutes ago? What if Julie Christie was trapped in this home without a subplot and didn’t have Michael and all she had was forget? Every time someone in my family gets wrapped up in dementia they don’t get a new tally mark out of it—they just go on living alone because they’re unlucky enough to go second. The ones who don’t catch it are lucky enough to get out while they can and they’ve left us here, half of us to remember and half of us unable to.
***
I am trapped in my head and in the past and I’ve locked Michael here with me. I’ve skipped every one of his appearances since 2006, and even that was a mistake. I’ve done my best to trap him in the ’70s, where he stays put, exactly as he’s meant, not yet ready to slip off. But I can’t catch him.
I’ve gone down the rabbit hole and done my best to find out how he spends his days because in his world, where he doesn’t know I’ve trapped him, he lives in the present and no I don’t want to know more about a Navy SEAL whose legacy is a CrossFit workout called The Murph. I want the Michael who cries out that New York, this fucking city, has turned into one big pile of dog shit. Today, his hair’s proper white and he looks like a grandfather with kind eyes and he’s managed to escape no matter how hard I try to keep him safe and god where has the time gone?
Today’s interviewer doesn’t know him like I do and look at that, we’ve got a local who’s been in the pictures, but now you live in a town with a lighthouse and what do you want your legacy to be? He says he just wants to leave behind a light footprint, he’d just like to go away. If people aren’t spending their dinners talking about Cary Grant they’re not gonna be worried about ol’ Mike Murphy. I really just want to go away. But I don’t want him to go gentle into any kind of night; I want him on loop, as the past, as himself, as I know him, as I hope he feels.
He’s living out his days as a big fish in a town that claims him, him and a lighthouse, and he shares, or maybe shared, his home with a dog named for a feminist who was once alive. He’s a big fish and won’t have to go away quietly. When I think of all the people I’ve lost momentum with and make peace with knowing they won’t belong to me when I’m ready to go away, I remember my grandma’s funeral and how only four of us showed because she’d outlived all her friends. My empty room will be a marker of my longevity. Anxiety may be a liar but in this moment it shows me all the possibilities. I’m not sour on people and I’m not sour on Michael and Michael’s not sour on people. He’s got his town, and his family, and people from the local paper to help the others remember who he’s been. Michael won’t have to outlive his people because he’s a big fish, a big fish who will outlive only his dog, and there will always be other people to celebrate his footprint who don’t even know him for his Catholic looks because they haven’t trapped him where he belongs no I’m not ready for this version of him.
CHINA BIALOS was born and raised in Los Angeles. Her work has been published by Canary Collective and Tangerine Press. In another life, she wrote about music for publications like Paste, Your Flesh, and Prefixmag.