Robert Forster
Actor who staged a late comeback and won an Oscar nomination for his part in Tarantino’s ‘Jackie Brown’
ROBERT Forster, who has died aged 78, was a ubiquitous character actor given a late-career boost when Quentin Tarantino cast him as the bail bondsman Max Cherry in his 1997 crime caper Jackie Brown, a role that won him an Oscar nomination for best supporting actor.
Forster had enjoyed a steady career playing cops, hoodlums and military men in such forgettable epics as Avalanche, Alligator and The Delta Force, but by the mid1990s his career was in the doldrums. Tarantino, however, detected an intriguing vulnerable quality in the actor which others had failed to exploit, and cast him as a shabby, world-weary ex-cop turned bail bondsman, a troubled, inherently decent man with an old-fashioned sense of gallantry.
Forster’s Max Cherry falls in love with Jackie Brown, a 44-year-old air stewardess (played poignantly by Pam Grier), and helps her to fleece the gun-runner for whom she moonlights, and the police, who have coerced her into becoming an informant.
Forster gives a nuanced, understated performance as he helps her play both sides against each other. Their unspoken love affair, wrote one critic, had him “weeping into my Butterkist”.
He was born Robert Wallace Foster on July 13, 1941 in Rochester, New York, later changing his surname to Forster because there was another actor with his name.
He went to the University of Rochester to study psychology and considered a legal career, but was diverted into acting after following an attractive girl into a room where auditions for the musical Bye Bye Birdie were taking place. He got a part in the chorus and married the girl.
Having moved to New York City, in 1965 Forster landed a role on Broadway in Mrs Dally Has a Lover. Spotted by the 20th Century Fox mogul Darryl F Zanuck, he was signed up to a contract, and made his screen debut in John Huston’s film of Carson McCullers’s novel Reflections in a Golden Eye.
He made his first big splash in the pioneering cinema verite of Haskell Wexler’s Medium Cool (1969), starring (opposite Verna Bloom) as a television news cameraman caught up in the violence surrounding the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
After that, however, television roles and B-movies became his main stock in trade until Jackie Brown.
“My career has gone in phases,” he explained after landing the role of Max Cherry. “There was a five-year good phase, then a 20-year not-so-good phase… Every time it reached a lower level I thought I could tolerate, it dropped some more, and then some more. Near the end, I had no agent, no manager, no lawyer, no nothing. I was taking whatever fell through the cracks.’’
A chance encounter with Tarantino ended the drought.
Among later roles, Forster graced two Hitchcockian remakes — Gus Van Sant’s Psycho, and a television film of Rear Window; he played a detective in David Lynch’s hauntingly enigmatic Mulholland Drive; and appeared in Breaking Bad as Ed Galbraith “the Disappearer”. Forster reprised the role in the recent Netflix film sequel El Camino, and was the sheriff in Lynch’s 2017 revisiting of his 1990s cult television series Twin Peaks.
His final performance was in Steven Spielberg’s series Amazing Stories, to be released later this year.
Forster, who died on October 11, was twice married and twice divorced.
He is survived by his partner, Denise, and by three daughters and a son.