Jeff Goldblum at 70: Why is Hollywood’s most adaptable character actor so underrated?

The voice is instantly recognisable: sardonic, humorous, questioning, a little nasal. It is telling the story behind the film of Norman Jewison’s Hollywood musical Fiddler on the Roof, about a Jewish milkman in a turn of the century shetl in Imperial Russia.

At first, you wonder why on earth a big name actor like Jeff Goldblum is narrating Fiddler’s Journey to the Big Screen, a new, low-budget documentary feature screening this week in the Berlin Film Festival market and made to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Fiddler on the Roof. Then you realise that is the whole point about Goldblum’s career. He continually pops up where you least expect it.

The actor turns 70 later this year. He remains the same ubiquitous presence in film and TV that he has been for much of the last 50 years. We’ll be seeing him back in among the dinosaurs later this summer in Jurassic World Dominion, the latest entry in one of the most successful movie franchises in recent movie history. He again plays the brilliant scientist and advocate of chaos theory, Dr Ian Malcolm.

Goldblum has done more than his fair share of Hollywood blockbusters (including Thor movies and Independence Day) while also appearing in gruelling independent pictures like Paul Schrader’s Holocaust drama, Adam Resurrected, and in several Wes Anderson, Lawrence Kasdan and Robert Altman films. He turns up in TV dramas, commercials and takes on voice work for video games and animated movies. Audiences will accept him in pretty much anything – and in pretty much any role. He can be villainous in one film and heroic in the next. He’s adept at playing alpha male types but also knows how to tap his own neurotic and needy side. He is frequently cast as scientists but also as womanising journalists. Sometimes, he is the leading man. Sometimes, he is “hidden” in the supporting cast. (Given that he is 6ft 4 inches tall, he tends to stick out but he still has the knack of fitting into ensemble pieces.)

An accomplished pianist, Goldblum released a 2018 jazz album, The Capitol Studios Sessions, which sold well and was respectfully received by critics. He is a seasoned stage actor with several Broadway credits to his name. These days, he is regarded as a fashion icon. “Goldblum is one of those perennials – like a fine wine, a little black dress – who gets more delectable with time,” one UK newspaper wrote of him in 2018 after he had appeared on American TV wearing an eye-popping, multicoloured Prada shirt.

Of course, this renaissance man knows all about the culinary arts as well. You can hear him holding forth on the joys of slow cooked fennel on chef Ruth Rogers’ River Cafe podcast.

The near septuagenarian now even has his very own TV series, The World According to Jeff Goldblum, in which he investigates the mysteries of the universe… or, at least, his own fascination with household objects and commonplace rituals. The series showcases Goldblum’s irrepressible enthusiasm and his thirst for knowledge. Whether he is asking earnestly just why dogs really are humans’ best friends or investigating our obsession with scary monsters, he deals with each new subject in a way that is humorous without being flippant, informative but never dry.

British producer Kevin Loader, who worked with Goldblum on Roger Michell’s low budget movie Le Week-end (2013), testifies to the American actor’s charm and willingness to make offbeat choices. Goldblum, Loader reveals, was paid far less than his co-stars Jim Broadbent and Lindsay Duncan (they worked four weeks on the film and he only worked one). “He did it for no money,” Loader says, with only minor exaggeration. He took the role because he had good memories of his previous film with Michell, the New York-set newsroom satire/romantic comedy Morning Glory (2010). His character in Le Week-end, the wealthy and successful academic Morgan, is shallow and very narcissistic. He is ultimately upstaged by Broadbent and Duncan (as the middle-aged Brummie couple on a weekend break in Paris). He is made to look a bit of a chump. Nonetheless, Goldblum relished the experience.

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The film had none of the trappings of big Hollywood productions but the producer recalls Goldblum as being easy-going and very low maintenance. “I remember picking him up from the airport in Paris and he had that quality which is sort of in the character as well, that he was capable of immense curiosity about other people,” says Loader. “By the time I had driven with him into the middle of Paris from Charles de Gaulle [Airport], I felt that I had downloaded half my life to him. He has an ability to get you to tell him things. He has an amazing ability to connect one to one with people. I think that is one of his great qualities as a person but it is also one of his qualities as an actor. His range is magnificent because he is always capable of inhabiting and connecting with the character is playing.”

Goldblum is very funny in Le Week-end. He’s an author and big shot with a much younger wife and an impressive wine cellar but he knows, deep down, that he’s a fraud. He got lucky while his cleverer old friend and mentor from his Cambridge University days (Broadbent) slipped into a mediocre, anonymous life in provincial academia. The role demonstrates Goldblum’s uncanny ability to play obnoxious characters in an ingratiating and often charming way.

Arguably, there is only one film in which Goldblum is entirely despicable – that is in his debut, as the street thug in Michael Winner’s Death Wish (1974). Here, he behaves like a lankier, New York cousin to the Droogs in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange. He is seen early on running amok with his gang in a supermarket and then tracking down a middle-class mother and her daughter to their apartment. The beanpole-like delinquent, who looks remarkably like a young Adam Driver, speaks in street slang (“don’t jive mother, you know what we want”). When the women turn out to have almost no money, he leads the brutal assault. “Goddamn rich c***s,” he snarls as the daughter is raped and the mother left for dead.

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It’s hard to think of a Goldblum performance further removed from his usual dapper, sophisticated screen persona. Michael Winner isn’t interested in his suavity or wit but only in his physicality and menace. There are no redeeming quips or winks at the camera here.

Winner’s film is crude and exploitative but he does successfully tap Goldblum’s delinquent energy. “Jeff is a very particular and eccentric screen presence,” David Cronenberg said after working with Goldblum on horror picture, The Fly (1986), in which the rakishly thin American actor plays Seth Brundle, the scientist whose DNA is fused with that of a household fly after the insect slips into the transporter pod at a vital moment.

Brundle undergoes one of the great screen transformations, turning from a human being to a giant insect. The process took five hours of make up and prosthetics to achieve – and Goldblum as the “Brundlefly” looks hideous at the end of it, deformed, sticky and utterly grotesque. Like Winner, Cronenberg was determined to get in touch with the actor’s animalistic side. The difference is that, in that performance, Goldman also shows his intelligence and charisma.

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Goldblum has always been willing to send himself up on talk shows and in comedy skits. When a giant, half-naked statue of him was put up beside Tower Bridge in London in 2018 to celebrate 25 years of Jurassic Park, he was so ready to poke fun at the absurdity of it all that no one would even think to mock him.

The self-deprecation is the actor’s way of deflecting attention, a hide-in-plain-sight strategy that keeps the media from ever getting too close to him. It’s also why he remains so underrated. Look through his movie credits and you’ll find very few awards. He was Oscar-nominated as a director for his 1996 short Little Surprises but has otherwise been roundly ignored when it comes to Academy Awards and Baftas. Given the roles he has played in some of the best as well as some of the biggest films of his era, that’s a travesty. As he turns 70 later this year, his consummate skills on screen should surely now be acknowledged. Whatever else, he’s the undisputed king of cameos. “I forgot my mantra,” Goldblum says, mystifyingly, down the phone in his blink-and-you’ll miss it appearance in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall (1977). Not many other actors can turn in a performance that lasts all of five seconds but that fans are still talking about 45 years later.

‘The World According to Jeff Goldblum’ is on Disney Plus; ‘Le Week-end’ is on Britbox; ‘Jurassic World: Dominion’ is out on 10 June