Chris Penn

There actually were three Penn brothers. Honestly, the least well known is probably Michael, though I remember seeing his video on MTV. (Sean turns out to be the middle child, which surprises me.) I wouldn’t be surprised if Michael won an Oscar for scoring someday. But I also think Chris would’ve, if he’d lived. He would have been one of those guys who put in years as a character actor before someday getting the perfect role that fit his talents so well they couldn’t not give him the Oscar for it. And everyone would’ve realized they’d known him for years without ever really thinking of him.

I mean, you grow up as Sean Penn’s younger brother, you probably have to cope with such things. Sean and Michael got to go to school with Rob Lowe and at least one of Martin Sheen’s boys, and the best you get for Chris is appearing in a movie with Christopher Hanks, who doesn’t even appear to be related. He then did an episode of Magnum, PI, which was the fashion at the time, followed by an early Tom Cruise movie, then Rumble Fish. He then made a short film with family friend Martin Sheen; Leo Penn was a minor actor who became a director because of the blacklist, and their mother was a minor actress who ended up doing a lot with her husband and sons.

Footloose should have been a breakout role. Unusually for my generation, I didn’t see the movie until adulthood, but he’s frankly charming in it. The scenes where he learns to dance were added because Penn himself couldn’t dance. He’s sweet and awkward. The character clearly doesn’t think of himself that way, but there we are. Penn was, of course, completely overshadowed by Kevin Bacon and John Lithgow, but if you watch the movie, it’s hard to miss the quality of Penn’s acting. Which frankly has a more sincere quality than his brother’s.

Somehow, instead of being sweet big guys, he got typecast as stupid tough guys. The first thing I saw him in was To Wong Foo, Thanks For Everything, Julie Newmar, where he played the horrible Sheriff Dollard, who spends the movie chasing the drag queens out of humiliation because he sexually assaulted a man when he was trying to sexually assault a woman. He’s so goofy that it’s easy to forget exactly what led to the whole thing. At that, Sheriff Dollard is tame by the standards of Penn characters; he even played a villain on The Young Riders.

However, he was also fighting a drug problem. It doesn’t seem to have directly caused his death, though prescription cold medicine seems to have been a contributing factor. So was an enlarged heart. His older brother said his weight caused his death, but I don’t know why we should be trusting Sean about that. Weight does not directly correlate to health. It’s entirely possible it was a causative factor, but it’s also possible it was not. Whatever caused his death, he died too young and almost certainly with better work yet to come.