This capable, portly Southern character player quickly amassed impressive feature credits with several major directors. Pruitt Taylor Vince landed his first role in Jim Jarmusch's "Down by Law" (1986), but did not survive the final cut. He entered films with a small role in Alan Parker's "Angel Heart" (1987) and proceeded to appear in Parker's "Mississippi Burning" (1988) and "Come See the Paradise" (1990). Andrei Konchalovsky tapped him for small roles in "Shy People" (1987) and "Homer and Eddie" (1989) before David Lynch cast him in "Wild at Heart" (1990). Vince first earned real notice as a fellow Vietnam veteran alongside Tim Robbins in Adrian Lyne's "Jacob's Ladder" (1990). He subsequently appeared in two of Oliver Stone's more controversial efforts, "JFK" (1991) and "Natural Born Killers" (1994). His breakthrough role, however, was as the village idiot who happens to be Paul Newman's best friend in Robert Benton's "Nobody's Fool" (1994). Following that turn, Vince had one of his best screen roles as Victor, a lonely overweight pizza maker who falls in love with the restaurant's new waitress (Liv Tyler) in James Mangold's "Heavy" (1996). In Ted Demme's "Beautiful Girls" (also 1996), he was the bar owner whose visiting cousin stirs up a small town.
After making his TV debut in an episode of NBC's "Crime Story", Vince landed his first major role as the reluctant accomplice of a pedophile in "I Know My First Name Is Steven" (NBC, 1989). He was again a hapless assistant to a criminal in "Till Death Do Us Part" (NBC, 1992). In fact, many of Vince's best small screen roles have traded on his large physique, close-cropped hair and shifty eyes (a result of a childhood birth defect). During the 1996-97 season, he offered a trio of outstanding villains: as a psychotic photographer who kidnaps FBI Agent Scully on Fox's "The X-Files", as janitor with a glass who may have kidnapped a missing child in the CBS miniseries "Night Sins", and as an eerie serial killer nicknamed 'The Street Sweeper' on the ABC drama "Murder One". For his performance in the latter, the actor received an Emmy as Outstanding Guest Actor in a Drama Series.