With the announcement of Jessica Walter’s death at age eighty, I cursed aloud with an angry sense of being cheated. Walter got to be a star very late in a long career, with her definitive roles as Lucille Bluth in the late, lamented Arrested Development and Malory Archer in the still-running animated favorite Archer. It seemed like just another egregious act of a douchebag god that she couldn’t live to be a hundred, acting the hell out of incorrigible characters for another twenty years.

Perhaps it’s my own tendency toward resentment of authority, but I find it odd to read celebrations of how great it is that Walter got to have a career spanning decades, as if it sure was nice of showbiz bosses to keep handing her roles that long.

In fact, Walter was robbed. She should’ve been a major star when she was a young woman — she was gorgeous, she was insanely talented and charismatic, she had everything. Stardom was predicted for her early when she made a big impression in film — first in The Group (1966) and then more definitely in Play Misty for Me (1971). But it didn’t happen.