Raising Arizona, celebrating its 20th anniversary this year, is the kind of cult comedy that blossoms with repeated viewings. Its most memorable scene doesn't involve leads Nicolas Cage and Holly Hunter. Instead, it follows an unpainted-furniture salesman named Nathan Arizona; one of his quintuplets has been abducted.

And Nathan Arizona. Well, shoot. Y'all know who he is. Or maybe not. Years after his death, Houston-born character actor Trey Wilson, who brought proud, frenzied and compassionate life to that character, is a vaguely familiar face and an unknown name.

But on DVD, that marvelous scene remains vivid. "Was the child wearing anything when he was abducted?" asks a police officer, gathering information for an APB.

"Nobody sleeps naked in this house!" says Nathan. He's unshaven and clad in a bathrobe, simultaneously tragic and comic. As Wilson played him, he's both believably frantic and wildly funny.

An FBI agent joins the fray: "What was the child wearing?" "A dinner jacket," snaps Nathan. "What do you think? He was wearing his damn jammies." "What did the jammies look like?"

"Aw, I dunno," says Nathan. His head rolls back in frustration, also reflected in his gruff voice. "They were jammies. They had Yodas and (expletive) on 'em." In Raising Arizona, Wilson was on screen no more than 12 minutes, and he lit up every one of them. "It's an inspired piece, to play the comedy of it so vividly and at the same time to be this realistically harried father," said Thomas Schlamme, a writer/producer (West Wing, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip) who was friends with Wilson.

Wilson's brief presence also improved movies such as Bull Durham, Great Balls of Fire and Married to the Mob. But he died before the Golden Age of Character Actors, before independent films expanded the kinds of roles available to men who aren't square-jawed and muscled. Movie lovers now know the names of actors like John C. Reilly and Paul Giamatti, and their roles are no longer limited to one-dimensional dupes, hams, villains and sidekicks. And in these salad days, even some certified leading men (Johnny Depp, Alec Baldwin) are unafraid to play peculiar and intriguing characters. That's now. Wilson died in 1989 just before things got good for his kind of actor.

He was born Donald Yearnsley Wilson III in 1948. Growing up in Bellaire, he showed a flair for the dramatic. "I could tell Wilson had it in him as an actor," says his cousin, State Rep. Kenneth "Kim" Brimer. "We'd play cowboys and Indians, and when you'd shoot Wilson he loved to be shot he'd take about 30 minutes to die. Flipping, flopping, rolling over …"

At Bellaire High School, he fell under the tutelage of storied drama director Cecil Pickett, who mentored Randy and Dennis Quaid, Brent Spiner, Brett Cullen and several other successful actors. But Wilson's family wasn't sold on his prospects as an actor. "We thought he'd make a good lawyer because they act a lot," said Wilson's mother, Mitzie Norman, laughing.

He studied acting at Trinity University and Houston Baptist University (again, with Pickett). At Astroworld, he played a snake oil salesman, Dr. Osgood T. Featherflowers. There, he met Randy Quaid, who had a job as a clown.

They started a comedy show, Quaid and Wilson, which debuted its sketch routines in 1970 at the Tattooed Lady nightclub on Pacific.

"Most of our stuff is creating comic characters something people can identify with," Wilson, 22 at the time, told the Chronicle. He also shot a TV pilot with his dog for Channel 39. Wilson's sister, Debbie Deska, said his sense of humor extended beyond performances.

Once, she says, a telemarketer called to tell him that he'd won a free subscription to Life magazine. "He said, Really! Well, this is a great day!' and went on and on. They talked a long time, and finally Trey said, This does come in Braille, right? Because I can't see … " The salesman hung up.

Wilson talked in that Chronicle interview of wanting to get into film. He eventually moved to Los Angeles, finding some work in soap operas and local theater, but Deska said he "had to come back home when he ran out of money. My parents weren't interested in supporting him out in L.A."

In Houston he worked as an assistant manager at a Windmill dinner theater in Town and Country. But he continued to peck away at Hollywood, eventually scoring his first film role a little-seen part in the little-seen Drive-In in 1976.

Two years later, he appeared with his friend Randy Quaid in Three Warriors. That same year he adopted an alter ego, and as "Terry Wayne" acted in a low-budget throwaway called Vampire Hookers. He did some well-regarded work on Broadway, and he even landed a role in Pat Benatar's video Love is a Battlefield. (He was the angry dad who kicked Benatar out of the house.) It was all acting, and Wilson desperately wanted to act.

In the mid-'80s, Wilson's parts grew bigger and better. Sweet, madcap Raising Arizona gave him the chance to show his stuff. "Eight hundred leaf tables and no chairs?" he screams at an employee over the phone. "You can't sell leaf tables and no chairs. Chairs you got a dinette set, no chairs you got (expletive) . . . I ask my wife she got more sense!"

Later, during the interrogation, he unravels. "I want Nathan Jr. back!" he yells in full froth. "Or whichever the hell one of them they took!" Despite its size, it's one of the great comic performances in American cinema: fluid, nuanced, physical, witty, cerebral, surprising and at the end of the film, touching, when he urges his son's kidnappers, an estranged couple, to rethink their split.

In the next two years, he did eight more movies: End of the Line, The House on Carroll Street, Bull Durham, Married to the Mob, Twins, Miss Firecracker, Great Balls of Fire and Welcome Home. Mob gave him a memorable exchange as a grizzled FBI regional director. When Michelle Pfeiffer's mafia widow scolds him "God, you people work just like the mob! There's no difference." he replies with straight-faced gravitas: "Oh, there's a big difference, Mrs. de Marco. The mob is run by murdering, thieving, lying, cheating psychopaths. We work for the president of the United States of America."

Great Balls of Fire, the Jerry Lee Lewis biopic, found Wilson playing legendary music producer Sam Phillips with understated, yet devious Southern charm. When Lewis' gun-toting cousin (played by musician John Doe) goes to Sun Studio to shoot Lewis for marrying his 13-year-old daughter, Phillips greases the situation.

"Who's to say it won't work out," he purrs with Iago-ish cunning, "and they won't end up happy in the end?"

"The one thing I really remember about that scene is that he was sort of at the center of it," Doe said. "He gave you that sense of support. My character stormed in with the gun, but he was leading the scene more than I was, directing it without being the actual focus of the scene. It was quite a feat.

"During the shoot he was the guy that people were always asking me about. He was one of those actors like Harry Dean Stanton for people in the know, he's the one they wanted to know about."

Wilson's old Houston friend, Schlamme, directed Miss Firecracker. Schlamme still remembers a scene between Wilson's character and the object of his affection played by Mary Steenburgen. "He couldn't speak," says Schlamme. "He just swallowed. It was like he was 6 years old around the Queen of England. It was so earnest and right. He could do that better than anybody: Be funny but be true, to blow a balloon as far as it could go before it pops.

"He had an everyman quality to him. A William Bendix quality. Today it's John C. Reilly, the Cellophane Man.' That's what we're always looking for. Very few people are able to really do that, to project for all of us what we're feeling." In Bull Durham, Wilson's animated, cussing manager had a routine for breaking bad news to a cut player: Light a cigarette, tell him to close the door and gruffly admit to carrying out a manager's toughest job. But those scenes lasted only minutes. As always, Wilson played a minor role and he was thrilled to be playing it.

"He said during the shoot for Bull Durham, they could spend days in the background over Tim (Robbins') shoulder," says Schlamme. "But you could still see them in the frame, standing in the dugout; so they had to be doing something. He was happy to be in the wings." Deska says he didn't mind his quasi-obscurity. "It made him so happy if somebody saw him and said, Hey it's that guy.' "

The Coen brothers writer Ethan and director Joel gave Wilson his big break with their Raising Arizona. They wrote a choice role in their period piece gangster film Miller's Crossing specifically for him.

On Jan. 13, 1989, two days before he was to fly to Louisiana to start filming it, he was at his New York City apartment. Wilson and his wife, Judy Blye Wilson, a successful soap opera casting agent, planned to celebrate his birthday early. But when she got home, he complained of a headache. The pain persisted, and she called 911. At the hospital, Blye Wilson was told her husband was brain dead. The cause was an arterial vascular malformation. "He never had a chance," his wife said.

Despite his line-drawn face and ability to play craggy characters, Trey Wilson was just 40. He'd also just passed a physical for Miller's Crossing. Wilson was buried on his birthday, Jan. 21. Randy Quaid and another old Houston acting friend, Brent Spiner, were pallbearers along with Wilson's cousin, Kim Brimer. Sam Phillips flew in from Memphis to attend.

After the funeral, other old friends also showed their respect for Wilson. Miss Firecracker was dedicated to him, as was Silence of the Lambs, the Oscar-winning thriller by director Jonathan Demme, who'd worked with him on Married to the Mob. Rep. Brimer introduced a resolution honoring Wilson, and the Texas legislature passed it. A Broadway production of Guys and Dolls was dedicated to his memory.

But life went on. The Miller's Crossing role was reworked for actor Albert Finney. It was a bold, proud performance, full of Finney's venerable spit and fire, but it's hard not to re-imagine it with Wilson's rough, spirited touch. It's harder still not to wonder what else Wilson could have done had he lived a few years longer.

Wilson's story ends in the same key as many of his performances: simultaneously tragic and comic. Prior to his funeral, a man called his family, pretending to be a reporter from the Houston Chronicle, and asked for some personal information including Wilson's Social Security number.

With that information, Regis Lee Toomey, a troubled lawyer, acquired a copy of Wilson's birth certificate and had a driver's license made. He started bogus businesses in the actor's name. Posing as Donald Yearnsley Wilson, Toomey is said to have inked bad checks and pawned merchandise.

Toomey was arrested in October 1989 and sentenced to 50 years in prison for theft. And Wilson's name once more lapsed back into obscurity. Friends, family and fans seemed to think bigger success was imminent. Hollywood's award season offers annual reminders of how movies have changed since he died; take the Golden Globe win and Oscar buzz for veteran character actor Forest Whitaker.

Robert Wuhl, who starred with Wilson in Bull Durham, said that had the actor lived another 10 years, "there's no question he becomes a John C. Reilly or a Jerry Orbach. He was a funny man and a great actor. He made you feel like he was on the way to his best role." "He was just turning a corner in his career," said Blye Wilson, "Each project he got closer and closer to a very big character spot."

Today Wilson's great, small roles are easy to find and enjoy. He made an impression as he put it, something people could identify with sometimes in a matter of minutes.