· Image Search

Miguel Ferrer -- it just rolls off the tongue. Miguel. Ferrer. Picture a Miguel Ferrer and what do you see? A man in a billowing white shirt and a sharp little Errol Flynn moustache, standing backlit by a full moon in a bedroom's open window? A dashing lover who ravishes the heaving-bosomed maiden, then stabs a nearby piece of fruit with his rapier, brings it suavely toward his mouth for a big, crunchy bite, then swings back out the open window on the long, billowing velvet drape?

Or perhaps you see a bald D.A. in a brown suit and matching tie.

Miguel Ferrer looks a lot like his dad, Jose Ferrer. But, truth be told, he doesn't look much like a guy whose name is "Miguel Ferrer." (Nor, for that matter, does he look much like his cousin, George Clooney -- who could himself pass for a Miguel Ferrer.)

Instead, Miguel Ferrer looks like a guy whose name is "FBI Agent Albert Rosenfield," which is probably why he played exactly that role on Twin Peaks. Squint, and you might see in him a "Bob Morton" -- the sniveling, ambitious apparatchik he played in RoboCop. Or wait -- take another gander in the fading light, and what do you see now? That's right -- it's "Chief Medical Examiner Garret Macy," Ferrer's current role, on Crossing Jordan.

Miguel Ferrer looks like a D.A., or a cop, or a DEA agent, or a medical examiner. Maybe a surgeon. On a good day, a Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning. Yes, he played that role once, too.

And Ferrer is aided by the fact that he has just enough swarthy exoticism about him that, in Hollywood's mind, he can play any kind of foreigner, from "Mr. Ortega Peru" in Mr. Magoo to "Tony Castellano" in Another Stakeout to "Stanislav" in A Promise Kept: The Oksana Baiul Story.

Miguel Ferrer is fine and dandy in all these roles. We think he makes a smashing D.A., especially when he squints unsentimentally, as D.A.s are known to do. But we do hope, for his sake as well as for ours, that once, just once, he gets to swing out an open window on a velvet curtain, his frilly white shirt all a-billow. Growing a pointy little moustache would be a start.