Homespun character actor stole the show
Wilford Brimley, a Utah blacksmith and horse trainer who made a career transition to movies and commercials, often stealing scenes as gruff and homespun characters in films such as Tender Mercies, The Natural and Cocoon, died Aug. 1 in a Utah hospital. He was 85.
His manager told The Associated Press he had been on dialysis and had several medical ailments.
After dropping out of high school to join the Marine Corps, Brimley was a bodyguard for reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes and a wrangler for ranches throughout the West. By the mid-1960s, he was working as a farrier shoeing horses for TV Westerns, and he eventually was recruited for stunts.
“I became friends with a fella named Bob Duvall,” he told the Los Angeles Times. “I met him on one of them horse opera TV deals. I was fascinated with what he was able to do as an actor. I’d never see anything like it.”
Brimley shifted from stunts to acting on the advice of a colleague who told him that “it pays better and you don’t have to hit the ground.”
With his burly physique, countrified drawl and overflowing moustache, Brimley looked every inch the prairie-roamer in Wild West oaters such as True Grit ( 1969) and Lawman (1971).
He also had a memorable supporting role as a nuclear- plant worker in The China Syndrome ( 1979) opposite Jack Lemmon.
His career advanced to a new level in Tender Mercies ( 1983), in which he played a music manager forced to deliver hard truths about the business to Duvall’s washedup alcoholic country singer.
On TV, Brimley had a recurring role on The Waltons in the 1970s and then starred in the NBC drama series Our House from 1986 to 1988. He also appeared on Seinfeld in 1997 as a rustic but menacing U. S. postmaster general who strong-arms Kramer into ending his boycott of mail delivery.
Anthony Wilford Brimley, the son of a real estate broker and a piano teacher, was born in Salt Lake City on Sept. 27, 1934, and grew up in Santa Monica, Calif. He quit school in eighth grade.
He served in the Marine Corps during the Korean War and was based in the Aleutian Islands.
His first wife, the former Lynne Bagley, died in 2000. In 2007, he married Beverly Berry, who survives him along with three sons from his first marriage. Another son died in infancy.