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John Ratzenberger: The Postman Always Strikes Back

A Man for All Uniforms

In Decipher’s Star Wars Customizable Card Game, Major Bren Derlin’s card comes with an odd biographical tidbit: “At the Mos Eisley Cantina, everyone knows his name.” If you’re scratching your head over this odd link between the sweltering desert world of Tatooine and the icy planet Hoth, don’t bother looking through your Star Wars novels and comics. It’s a joke — an allusion by Decipher to the fact that John Ratzenberger, a bit player in The Empire Strikes Back, would go on to star for more than a decade in Cheers, one of the most popular TV sitcoms in American history, set in a bar where, as the song goes, everyone knows your name.

Yes, Cliff Clavin, the Boston letter carrier and know-it-all barfly, is in The Empire Strikes Back — at least for a couple of scenes and a couple of lines. It’s the mustachioed Ratzenberger, clad in his snow gear, who regretfully informs Princess Leia that the shield doors of Echo Base must be closed against the Hoth night, even though Han Solo hasn’t returned from his hunt for Luke Skywalker. He can also be glimpsed and briefly heard again in the scene in which Leia gives the Rebel pilots their orders for evacuating the planet and protecting the Alliance’s transports.

Ratzenberger was 32 in the spring of 1979, when he spent about a week on the Echo Base set at Elstree Studios, in a suburb north of London. (Luckily for Ratzenberger, all of Major Derlin’s scenes were interior scenes, meaning the actor didn’t have to endure sub-zero temperatures and constant winter storms atop the Finse Glacier in Norway, where the exterior scenes on Hoth were shot.)

Two decades — and what the actor genially admits are “a lot of cobwebs” — have obscured some of his memories of his time on the set. He says he admired director Irvin Kershner, whom he describes as “an old-school director.” But his memories are crystal clear when he confesses to having his head turned by one particular co-star.

“I remember having an enormous crush on Carrie Fisher,” he says, but adds that under the circumstances, he harbored no illusions about the chances for, well, a princess and a guy like him. “I was living in what pretty much amounted to an abandoned building at the time, so there wasn’t much I could offer,” he says.

By Ratzenberger’s account, he wasn’t exactly swept up in the hysteria of being part of the hotly anticipated sequel to what was then the top-grossing movie of all time. “I really didn’t know it had become this huge thing, [though] I was aware there was a movie out called Star Wars,” he says. “It was a job. I was hired to do a job, I showed to up to do a job, and I went home.”

Nor was it even a particularly out-of-the-ordinary job for the young actor. At the time, he recalls, he was one of several American actors living in London who would get the call whenever a movie shot in the area called for an American in uniform. Ratzenberger’s early work, indeed, is a tale of bit parts and changing ranks: He played lieutenants in A Bridge Too Far and Gandhi, a corporal in Yanks, a chief in Firefox, a sergeant in Hanover Street, and also donned government gear for Superman and Superman II. Under those circumstances, one can see how Bren Derlin was just another major – albeit one from a galaxy far, far away.

Still, Ratzenberger got to that galaxy along an unusual route. Before he headed for London in 1971, his resumé included such jobs as an apprentice blacksmith in northern Vermont and a deckhand on an oyster boat off the coast of his native New England. It was a tax refund from his stint as a deckhand, in fact, that sent him across the pond. As Ratzenberger recalls, the check happened to be the exact same amount as a ticket on a charter flight to England that he saw in a newspaper. He had a friend in London, so he left on a lark for a three-week visit — never suspecting he would stay 10 years.

It wasn’t long before Ratzenberger and friend Ray Hassett began achieving considerable renown as Sal’s Meat Market, an improv duo whose freewheeling 90-minute shows would cast each of them in as many as 20 characters apiece. The two were veterans by the time an agent approached them and asked if they’d thought about movies. Ratzenberger’s screen debut came in 1976’s The Ritz, directed by Richard Lester (A Hard Day’s Night), who would later direct him in Superman II.

Familiar Voices

Besides his stints as an American in uniform, Ratzenberger also did extensive voice work, providing English dubs for foreign films — a key addition to what he calls “my bag of tricks.” That work spotlights what the actor sees as an advantage of having learned his craft in England: “They don’t pigeonhole you over there,” he says. “As a journeyman actor, you were expected to do everything.”

It’s a matter-of-fact approach that Ratzenberger traces back to having grown up working with his hands. It also meant that for the young actor playing Major Derlin, Harrison Ford was someone to watch. Ford, like Ratzenberger, was a self-taught actor without formal training. And like Ratzenberger, he’d worked as a carpenter — though Ratzenberger notes that Ford was a fine carpenter who worked on finishing and other jobs, while Ratzenberger himself was (and is) a house framer more used to working with two-by-fours. Nonetheless, Ratzenberger remembers watching Ford succeed and being inspired.

“I remember thinking, ‘Wow, that’s pretty cool,'” he says. “if he could do it, I could do it.” Indeed he could: beginning in 1982, Ratzenberger would become a fixture on TV wearing another uniform — this time for the postal service-on Cheers. That role sprung from a failed audition that Ratzenberger turned into a success by drawing on the oldest trick in his bag — his years of improv.

“What I do well is just improvise within the situation,” he says. “Drop me into the situation and I’ll do fine.”

Ratzenberger says he originally read for a non-descript character for Cheers — an approach that was too stilted for him to shine. He was walking out the door when he asked Cheers’ creative team if their show had a certain character he felt was needed.

“Being a New Englander, I knew that in every bar I’ve ever been in, there’s a bar know-it-all,” Ratzenberger says. After piquing the group’s interest, he began to improvise just such a part, using anything at hand — such as people’s clothes and last names — as his material. He left the group laughing and eventually was called back and asked to become the bar know-it-all he’d quickly invented — the character that would become Cliff Clavin.

Having won the job with improv, Ratzenberger would use the skill to create any number of off-the-cuff lines for Cliff during Cheers’ 11 -year run-and then for the computer-generated characters to whom he lent voices in three blockbuster Pixar films, including A Bug’s Life and both of the Toy Story movies, in which he plays the talking pig toy, Hamm.

Ratzenberger has also embraced a growing role with a good cause. He’s the chairman of an online charity called childrenwithdiabetes.com, offering children who have diabetes and their families everything from medical advice to a place to chat with other children and families.

Childrenwithdiabetes.com sprung from his desire to find a way to connect researchers working (sometimes in ignorance of each other’s efforts) to find a cure for the disease. “They don’t talk to each other,” Ratzenberger says. “I thought, in the age of the Internet, that’s stupid.”

Between that work and his ongoing acting, Ratzenberger may not have a lot of time to look back at what was a very brief tour of duty on Hoth 20 years ago. Nor, by his account, does he get much fan mail for his Star Wars work. But for this journeyman-actor-turned-master, the body of work he has put together is proof enough.

Indeed, whether they’re fans of George Lucas’ saga, a beloved bar in Boston, Pixar’s pioneering productions, or all three, everybody knows John Ratzenberger’s name.

By Jason Fry