Washed-up actor revived his career after chance meeting with Quentin Tarantino
Robert Forster, who has died aged 78, was a washed-up, out-of-work actor struggling to pay the alimony when, one day in 1995, Quentin Tarantino walked into the Los Angeles restaurant where he was having breakfast. ‘‘I snared him,’’ Forster recalled. ‘‘We talked for a while and I said, ‘‘What are you working on?’’
Tarantino, who had just directed the Oscar-winning Pulp Fiction, told him he was adapting Elmore Leonard’s novel Rum Punch and suggested that he read the book. Six months later, the still out-of-work Forster bumped into Tarantino again at the same restaurant. The director handed him a copy of the script, now titled Jackie
Brown, and told him: ‘‘Read this, see if you like it.’’
When Tarantino announced that he had him in mind for the male lead, Forster was incredulous: ‘‘My career by then was dead,’’ he later recalled. Over breakfast, he told the director, ‘‘Look, I appreciate it, but I don’t think they’ll let you hire me.’’
‘‘I hire anybody I want,’’ Tarantino replied. Forster was cast as Max Cherry, a shabby excop turned bail bondsman who helps then falls for Jackie Brown, a middle-aged moneysmuggling air stewardess, played by Pam Grier. Forster’s subtle and poignant portrayal revived his career and won him an Oscar nomination. It was, he said, ‘‘a gift, the size of which cannot be exaggerated’’.
Thirty years earlier, Forster’s career had started promisingly. He made his debut in John Huston’s 1967 adaptation of Carson McCullers’ novel Reflections in a Golden Eye, riding a horse bareback and naked, watched by his co-stars Elizabeth Taylor and Marlon Brando.
‘‘When they asked me if I knew how to ride, I did what all actors do, I said yes,’’ he recalled. In fact, he had never been on a horse, ‘‘except when I was a kid, where you paid 10 cents to sit on a pony and walk around in a circle’’. The wardrobe department handed him a leather jockstrap ‘‘for modesty’’, but he tossed it in the bushes, telling himself that if he didn’t play the role ‘‘with absolute abandon, you have no right to be an actor’’.
There were further roles, including alongside Gregory Peck in the western The Stalking Moon (1968) and as a television news cameraman with Marianna Hill in Medium Cool (1969), but by the 1970s his career was in decline. He later likened his professional life to a play with ‘‘a five years upwards first act and a 25-year sliding second act’’.
He took anything on offer. Parts in directto-video movies such as Maniac Cop III: Badge of Silence and Point of Seduction: Body Chemistry III were evidence of his desperation. ‘‘Every time it reached a lower level I thought I could tolerate, it dropped some more, and then some more,’’ he said. ‘‘I was taking whatever fell through the cracks.’’
When the movie roles dried up, he worked as a motivational speaker, trying to rehabilitate prisoners, whom he urged to change their lives with the motto: ‘‘No matter how bad things get, you can still win it in the late innings.’’
He was born Robert Wallace Foster Jr in Rochester, New York, adding the extra letter to his surname in adulthood to avoid confusion with another actor. His father was an elephant trainer in the Ringling Brothers travelling circus. Forster paid tribute to his heritage when he hung one of his father’s Barnum & Bailey circus posters in the office of his character in Jackie Brown.
His parents divorced when he was eight and he was brought up by his mother, Grace, who took her own life in 1966 when he received his draft notice to fight in Vietnam. As a result of her death, his call-up was deferred and he never served.
He studied history and psychology at the University of Rochester, where he was contemplating a career as a lawyer, when he spotted a young woman in a black leather raincoat. ‘‘As I was trying to think of what to say, I followed her into an auditorium.’’ It turned out that she was a stage hand on a student production of Bye Bye Birdie .He landed a role in the chorus and fell in love with acting and the girl, June Provenzano, whom he married in 1966.
They divorced in 1975 and a second marriage, in 1978 to Zivia Forster, ended in 1980. He is survived by his partner, Denise Grayson, three daughters from his first marriage, and a son from another relationship.
After Jackie Brown, his packed resume included appearances in Gus Van Sant’s remake of Psycho, David Lynch’s revival of Twin Peaks and in Breaking Bad as ‘‘the Disappearer’’, providing new identities for criminals evading the law. He reprised the role in the Netflix sequel El Camino, which was released on the day he died.
Forster would look back on the lean years with stoicism. ‘‘Everything teaches you something,’’ he noted. ‘‘The job of real life is caring for others. All else is superfluous to that.’’ – The Times