Barney Furey

With Biograph and Selig from the early 1910s, skinny, sneaky-looking Barney Furey actually began his screen career playing leads. By the 1920s, however, he had already established himself as Hollywood's favorite "rat-fink," playing unscrupulous characters (sometimes comically so) in scores of programmers. He weathered the transition to sound in fine style and continued to appear in low-budget Westerns until his death from a liver disease.