Biography

February 7, 1955 · Santa Monica, California, USA

January 19, 2017 · Los Angeles, California, USA (throat cancer)

Miguel José Ferrer

6′ (1.83 m)

Deep gravelly voice

Often played sleazy, untrustworthy scoundrels

[on making Crossing Jordan (2001)] It was great. I loved that. Six years on the same show, working on the same lot. Got to go home and see my kids every night. They weren't always awake, but I saw them. I loved that there were no out-of-control egos on the set. I loved working with the same people for six years. You develop a sure hand, and you learn how one works and likes to work. I wouldn't trade it for anything. We had a ball.

[on making RoboCop (1987)] RoboCop was maybe the best summer of my entire life. It was the summer of 1986, and it was the best part I'd been asked to do at the time, and working with an amazing director, Paul Verhoeven. The writer Edward Neumeier and I became great friends, and he gave me just so much to work with. I woke up every day and when I was looking at myself in the mirror shaving, I just couldn't believe my good fortune. I was the happiest guy probably in the state during that time. To tell you the truth, while we were doing it, I had no idea that it wouldn't be silly. I had no idea if it was going to be a good movie or a bad movie, or what it was going to be. I knew that it was great fun to make, but while you're in the middle of these things, you just don't know how it's going to turn out. It has to pass through so many hands-editing, the music, the sound design, how it's marketed, and all the rest of it. You just don't know. And sometimes the RoboCop suit itself looked absolutely laughable. And they struggled to find angles in which it didn't look silly, so to tell you the truth, at the time, many of us, myself especially, had no idea if it was going to be any good. Then I saw a screening of the finished product before it came out and I knew it was a really wonderful, different kind of picture, with sophisticated humor and yet good action and compelling characters and something that was really special. I remember the first time sitting in the movie theater and watching a trailer, and the audience absolutely laughed at it in the worst way possible. Which was, to say the least, disheartening. Then, I remember the first night the movie came out and I think I drove around to every theater in Los Angeles in which it was playing and kind of stood in the back and watched the reaction, and that was one of the great thrills of my life.

[on his acting preparation] I'm not really a guy who draws on things from my own past. I think if you're a competent actor with a good imagination, and if it's on the page, it makes your job a lot easier. If it's well written, it allows your imagination to run wild and draw inspiration from that. I'm not one of those people who writes a biography or tries to figure out what kind of ice cream the character liked when he was 10. If your attention is on something like that, I just think it's a bit of a wank. If your attention is on superfluous aspects that are not part of the story, then you can't be concentrating on the human realities of the piece.

[1999] My favorite place in the whole world is Jackson Hole, Wyoming. The whole experience in Wyoming is just fantastic. It's renewing. In the winter we will go skiing, and during the summer there's golf, there's Yellowstone, there's just whatever. It's the best place in the world.