That's the reason Walken's skit with Tim Meadows was so funny during his appearance hosting "Saturday Night Live" on April 8. Meadows played a census taker who happens onto the apartment of a Mr. Leonard, played by Walken, an ex-con who works full time as a performance artist and keeps house with a bobcat for a wife and various plants and candy bars as cohabitants. (Don't ask.) Meadows is so nonplused by the absurd conversation that he just takes down what's said and calls it a day. Walken strolls back into his apartment to the growl of his bride, slams the door behind him and yells, "Again? We just did it!"

The evening marked Walken's fourth time hosting the show, and you could tell by the success of the various sketches why they keep asking the 57-year-old veteran actor back for more. Such "SNL" appearances illustrate the degree to which Walken has become a sort of Gen X pop culture deity. Sure, he's no Tom Cruise. He's not a blockbuster film star, like a Harrison Ford, a Mel Gibson or even a Bruce Willis, though he does play the lead on occasion. But in a way, Walken is larger than any of them because he has carved out a niche for himself that only he can fill -- that of Christopher Walken.

No one plays the kook, the psycho, the fallen angel, the deadly crime lord, the bloodthirsty ghoul better than Walken, and no one can utter the world's most bizarre dialogue with such panache, making it believable just because he said it. There's only one Christopher Walken, just as there was only one Sal Mineo or Tony Perkins. And when C.W. is gone, there'll never be another.

Walken has said that the way he looks has helped define his career. All actors rely on their bodies, but in the case of Walken much of his screen persona resides in his unusual appearance. Tall and lanky, with a high forehead and poofy hair, he does appear, well, otherworldly -- as if he just stepped off the mothership. But there's also his highly unusual manner of speaking, which has made him one of the most imitated stars around. You can hear his native Queens in his voice, but those weird, abrupt pauses and clipped sentences seem unique to the man.

"I have a certain way about me that's strange," Walken told Dark Side magazine in 1996. "Strangeness can translate into a kind of phobia in people's minds. It's fine by me. I work. A lot of actors don't."

He continued, "It started with 'Annie Hall.' There was a scene where I talked about driving myself into oncoming traffic, and then there was 'The Deer Hunter,' where I shot myself in the head. If you're lucky in films, you find an identity. When you become a dependable villain, the chances are that you will specialize in those roles."

Indeed, Walken's role as Annie Hall's suicidal brother, Duane, played for laughs in the 1977 Woody Allen comedy, set the precedent of Walken as freak show that would define his long career. When he won the Academy Award for best supporting actor, it was for his moving portrayal in "The Deer Hunter" (1978) of an American soldier in Vietnam who goes off the deep end and eventually terminates his life in a gambling den via Russian roulette as Saigon falls to the communists. Until that point he had not made much money as an actor, but winning the Academy Award changed everything.

Walken told Playboy in 1997, "We went to bed (following the Oscars and an after party), and I said to my wife, with the Oscar in my hand, 'This is a house.' And it was. I was holding our house in my hand -- I knew that's what it meant."

It meant a step up on the food chain, moneywise. From then on out, he would make enough money to keep a house in Connecticut and a brownstone on Manhattan's Upper West Side, both of which he shares with his wife of 31 years, casting director Georgianne Thon. (They met while both were performing in a touring rendition of "West Side Story" in 1969 and have been together ever since.)

"The Deer Hunter" was only Walken's eighth screen appearance, but in a sense, at the age of 35, he had been working toward this benchmark his entire life. Both of his parents were immigrants -- his father, Paul, from Germany; his mother, Rosalie, from Scotland. Walken himself, the second of three sons, was born on March 31, 1943, and named Ronald for British actor Ronald Colman. His name change would come years later, when a singer Walken was working with named Monique Van Vooren renamed him Christopher for reasons that are unclear, and the name stuck. Walken's old friends still call him Ronnie.

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