It's the early 1990s, you are a Hollywood casting director and your next vapid blockbuster requires a shifty, rabble-rousing, red-neck politician on the make. You call JT Walsh.
"Blessed" with the piggish mien and callous, pin-prick eyes of a corrupt Alabama mayor, Walsh was tinsel town's pre-eminent WASP villain.
A former student radical and life-long Democrat, he became the epitome of small-town sleaze and racist thuggery. His crooked cops and yokel braggarts were cinematic archetypes, enlivening a string of workaday middlebrow dramas.
Walsh's big break arrived in 1984 when he landed the part of a reptilian real estate dealer in David Mamet's Broadway sensation, Glengarry Glen Ross (Kevin Spacey would reprise the character in James Foley's 1992 movie adaptation).
Critics slavered over Mamet's brutal dissection of the masculine ego and proclaimed Walsh the year's brightest hope.
He decamped to Hollywood in 1986, turning in a spirited blink-and-you-miss-it cameo in Woody Allan's Hannah and her Sisters and debuting that corpulent scumbag persona in the laconic blue-collar comedy, Tin Men, directed by Barry Levinson.
By the time his role as Robin William's obnoxious drill sergeant in 1987's Good Morning Vietnam introduced him to mainstream audiences, Walsh had become terminally type-cast.
Henceforth, scripts merely required him to heft his gut, lay on a southern drawl and make like a bigoted fat guy.
An attempt to broaden his range as a conscience-wracked marine officer in 1992's workaday Tom Cruise/Jack Nicholson vehicle, A Few Good Men, raised eyebrows, but Walsh remained ghettoised. Playing a fusty town elder in his final movie, Pleasantville (1998), he threatened self parody.
A heart attack claimed him several months later.
When Jack Nicholson was named Best Actor at that year's Oscars (for the limp rom-com, As Good as It Gets), he dedicated the accolade to Walsh.
He is today remembered as a decent man who earned a living depicting gutless ogres.
A pity. JT was one of the good guys.
For more on JT Walsh, see www.imdb.com