Finest hours: Robert Walker as the charm-school sociopath in Strangers on a Train

Robert Walker died aged 32, the result of an accidental toxic interaction between alcohol and a sedative drug, which was in itself a tragedy. That his death came just a year after his enduring performance as Bruno Antony in Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train (1951), when his career finally started living up to his immense talent, made his premature death all the sadder.

In the decade before Strangers on a Train, Walker had appeared in a variety of movies, sometimes in smaller parts, sometimes as the romantic lead. He was the endearingly eager lab assistant who witnessed Marie (Greer Garson) and Pierre Curie (Walter Pidgeon) falling in love in Madame Curie (1943), the loyal enlisted man who cheerfully helped the officers in Thirty Seconds over Tokyo (1944), and the adorable soldier on leave caught up in a whirlwind romance with Judy Garland in The Clock (1945). Because his rise to stardom coincided with World War II, a large proportion of his roles were these affable young servicemen, missing their tiny hometowns as they stared wide-eyed at the big world ahead of them.

While many of his roles were characterised by a sweet naiveté, Walker was never a one-note actor. There was a nerviness to him, a certain vulnerability that lent an immediacy to his performances. He was a young soldier again in Since You Went Away (1944), where he starred opposite Jennifer Jones. The pair were married in real life, and in the midst of an agonising divorce. Their romantic scenes together were hard on both of them, but the offscreen turmoil gave the onscreen romance an undeniable electricity.

Even in lesser films, Walker excelled. Elia Kazan considered Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn vehicle The Sea of Grass (1947) his worst movie; regardless, Walker is still arresting in his brief screen-time as Hepburn’s tormented illegitimate son. And though Jerome Kern biopic Till the Clouds Roll By (1946) was an overlong confection that fabricated Kern’s backstory to a bizarre extent, Walker’s depiction of the composer as an older gentlemen was an impressive feat of physicality for a man in his mid-twenties.

Of course, it was Bruno who became Walker’s claim to cinematic immortality. The gleefully conniving sociopath charms tennis player Guy (Farley Granger) during a long train journey, where he floats his idea for a murder scheme where they both kill the person the other most wants dead, leaving the crimes untraceable. Guy thinks he’s joking, but when his philandering wife is strangled to death a few days later, he realises otherwise.

That sweetness that Walker brought to his roles up until that point made his villain intriguingly dimensional. Bruno wields his unthreatening exterior like a weapon, and it keeps wrongfooting Guy. Though he knows he’s a killer, something in him can’t comprehend this man with his manicured nails and jaunty fashion sense (Bruno’s coded as gay, just as Granger’s character was in his previous Hitchcock collaboration, 1948’s Rope) would be capable of such brutality. Later in the film, after punching him in the face in a fit of understandable rage, Guy quickly moves to helping him up and dusting him off, making sure he’s okay.

Walker gives us the sense that Bruno feels he’s in full control of how he’s perceived. He’s able to dial his charm and malevolence up or down at will, and is thrilled to be puppeteering those around him so deftly; it’s chilling to witness how quickly his eyes change from warm to ice-cold. Yet there are persistent hints that he’s not as in control of his actions as he thinks he is, those whispers of lunacy adding even more texture to the heady stew of his character. Walker embraced all of Bruno’s dynamic complexities with aplomb. He’d never had such a richly drawn role before, and would never again.  

There was one more movie afterwards, however. In My Son John (1952), Walker played the titular son whose horrified parents (Dean Jagger and Helen Hayes) realise he is a communist.

Released during the height of the Red Scare, Leo McCarey’s film was a vituperative, nonsensical anti-communist screed. Despite that, Walker succeeded in bringing a sympathetically conflicted heart to his villainised lead. Watching today, his John – stuck between a vestige of filial loyalty and his commitment to this new cause –  seems by far the most layered character, benefitting hugely from Walker’s deftness at playing both chilliness and vulnerability.  

He died after the production had wrapped but before the necessary reshoots. The obvious efforts to work around his absence, including the reusing of a critical shot from Strangers on a Train, made for a spooky, deeply sad end to the career of an actor with boundless potential.