David Johansen

Johansen's career started where most people's careers peak — fronting The New York Dolls in the early 1970s, a band that didn't sell many records but essentially handed punk rock its blueprint. The Dolls broke up, he went solo, and then came Buster Poindexter. A reinvention. By the mid-1980s, the Buster persona was landing him television appearances and a genuine pop hit, and somewhere in that window he started taking acting seriously. The film work came fast once it started. Candy Mountain (1987) and Married to the Mob (1988) showed up early, but Scrooged the same year was the one that stuck. Playing the Ghost of Christmas Past as a cab driver who's done with your nonsense — it's a small role, but Johansen makes it land every single scene he's in. Let It Ride followed in 1989, then Freejack (1992), Mr. Nanny (1993), and the Car 54, Where Are You? lead in 1994 (IMDb, Rotten Tomatoes). That's a lot of film work packed into roughly seven years, which doesn't get mentioned enough when people talk about this period of his life. On television, he turned up on Miami Vice, The Equalizer, Oz, and The Adventures of Pete & Pete — a range that tells you something about how directors saw him: useful, adaptable, never quite the same twice. He kept acting well into the 2020s (Wikipedia). Hard to say if there's one role that fully captured what he could do on screen, but the cab driver in Scrooged comes close. He died in February 2025, and the obituaries — rightly — led with the music. But the acting career deserved its own paragraph.