The actor John Vernon has has died at the age of 72. You may not recognize the name, but you’ll know the face as soon as you click that link. As all the obituaries are noting, he had a long film career and appeared in some very well-known flicks, including Dirty Harry and The Outlaw Josey Wales, so you’ve no doubt caught him in something. According to Mark Evanier, he even did some voice work in cartoons, playing the superheroes Iron-Man and The Sub-Mariner in the ’60s, and more recently performing multiple characters in the Pinky and the Brain shorts. But the role for which he’s going to be remembered, the one mentioned in most of the headlines I’ve seen, is Dean Wormer in Animal House.

One of my favorite comedies, Animal House was a true Hollywood success story, a low-budget mess of a movie with modest ambitions and a largely unknown cast. It became a monster hit largely because of its own audacity, and the willingness of everyone involved to wallow in crassness. (It didn’t hurt that it was genuinely funny.) The film made John Belushi a big-screen star, launched Kevin Bacon‘s career, and established a template that would be used by many successful comedies over the next ten years. There are elements of Animal House in Caddyshack, the Revenge of the Nerds movies, the Police Academy series, and even in Ghostbusters, and none is more recognizable than the killjoy authority figure prototyped by Vernon’s Dean Wormer. The thing that sets Wormer apart from the characters that followed, however, was a streak of genuine sadism — Wormer wasn’t simply a snobby, by-the-book servant of The Establishment. He genuinely enjoyed repressing, bullying, and crushing those who didn’t live up to his image of “the right kind of people.” Vernon played the role to the hilt, using a smug expression and gleefully sarcastic delivery to create a truly hateful human being. Wormer’s come-uppance is one of the most satisfying resolutions ever put on film.

I have no idea what Vernon was like in Real Life — I don’t recall ever seeing him interviewed — but nine times out of ten it seems like the nastiest characters are portrayed by the nicest people. I’d like to imagine that John Vernon prototyped that role as well…