Everyman appeal of a real star
Bill Paxton Actor BORN MAY 17, 1955 – DIED FEBRUARY 25, 2017, AGED 61
FOR an actor who was in four of the biggest blockbusters of the 1990s: True Lies, Apollo 13, Twister and Titanic, Bill Paxton wasn’t someone you would automatically describe as a huge movie star. Yet that’s just the way he liked it. For more than four decades he worked continuously in front of or behind the camera.
“I’ve had a career that is kind of under the radar but it sure is varied,” he once said. “And I have been so blessed to be able to get paid to do something I love.”
While Paxton went on to appear in more than 50 films, he specialised at playing the everyman in movies such as A Simple Plan opposite Billy Bob Thornton and Nightcrawler with Jake Gyllenhaal.
In 2001 he decided to make his directorial debut with the dark thriller Frailty, which starred himself and Matthew McConaughey. Four years later he directed Shia LaBeouf in the golfing drama The Greatest Game Ever Played.
More recently Paxton was a familiar face on television, earning three Golden Globe nominations for his role as a polygamist in the series Big Love, as well as an Emmy nomination for historical miniseries Hatfields & McCoys in 2012.
At the time of his death he was playing a detective in the gritty CBS drama Training Day. Yet it didn’t matter what medium he worked in or what level of success he achieved, the consensus in Hollywood was that Paxton was one of the most downto-earth, kind-hearted and genuine actors in the business.
As his close friend James Cameron, who directed Paxton in Titanic, Aliens, True Lies and The Terminator, said this week: “Bill leaves such a void. He was a good man, a great actor and a creative dynamo.”
Born in Fort Worth, Texas, he was the son of Mary Lou and John Paxton, a businessman and sometime actor. When he was eight he was in the crowd that welcomed John F Kennedy in Texas on the morning of November 22, 1963, hours before the President was killed in Dallas. “I remember just a really euphoric crowd,” he recalled in a 2013 interview. “I was a bit young to really understand the consequences of the event.”
After graduating from high school he moved to Los Angeles hoping to break into the film industry and found a job as a set dresser, which is what he was doing when he met James Cameron. They were both working on a Roger Corman film when Cameron slapped a brush in Paxton’s hand and said: “Paint that wall.” A year later Cameron cast him as a blue-haired punk in his 1984 film The Terminator.
The following year Paxton starred in Weird Science, playing Chet Donnelly, the bullying and blackmailing older brother to one of the movie’s main characters. And so began his acting career.
His last film The Circle, starring Emma Watson and Tom Hanks, will be released later this year.
Paxton, who died following complications from heart surgery, is survived by his second wife Louise and their two children James, an actor, and Lydia.
His marriage to actress Kelly Rowan ended after a year in 1980.