Bill Paxton
Actor who starred in Aliens, Twister and Titanic and brought a spark of humanity to One False Move
BILL PAXTON, who has died from complications following heart surgery aged 61, was one of the most dependable supporting actors of his generation, and made memorable appearances in films such as True Lies, Aliens and Titanic, all of which were directed by his friend James Cameron.
Paxton and Cameron first met as young men when they were working on a low-budget movie. “We quickly recognised the creative spark in each other and became fast friends,” the director recalled. He gave a bit part to his friend in The Terminator (1984), in which Paxton played a pugnacious blue-haired punk who is flung against a metal gate by Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Terminator. It was not the last time he would suffer a grisly fate on screen and Paxton was thought to be the only actor to have been killed off by the Terminator, Predator (in Predator 2) and an extraterrestrial “xenomorph” (in Aliens).
He would often take on roles which belied his all-American good looks, and was all the more effective as a result. In Weird Science (1985) he played the sneering and sadistic older brother Chet with a perfect combination of menace and comic timing. In 1986 he was the oafish, cowardly and yet strangely sympathetic Private William Hudson in Cameron’s Aliens, and he seemed to revel in his portrayal of Simon, the deeply unpleasant misogynist car salesman in True Lies (1994).
In 1997 Paxton appeared at the beginning and end of Cameron’s Titanic as a modern-day treasure hunter, and he also worked with Cameron on his documentary Ghosts of the Abyss (2003), in which Paxton, Cameron and a group of scientists made an expedition to the wreck of Titanic using Russian deep submersibles.
William Paxton was born on May 17 1955 in Fort Worth, Texas, the son of Mary Lou (née Gray) and John Lane Paxton, a lumber salesman who later followed his son into acting.
As an eight-year-old, young Bill was in the crowd when John F Kennedy emerged from his hotel on the morning of his assassination and a photograph of him being lifted above the crowd is on display in a museum in Texas.
He later produced the film Parkland (2013), about the chaotic events that followed the shooting.
After becoming interested in filmmaking as a teenager, Paxton moved to Los Angeles where he met Cameron, whom he helped to create the spaceships for Galaxy of Terror (1981), the cult horror B-movie.
Paxton’s other film roles included that of a psychotic vampire in Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark (1987) and the somewhat innocent chief of police in Carl Franklin’s One False Move (1992), which brought a spark of humanity and subtlety to a dark and violent film.
In Apollo 13 (1995) he was one of the astronauts of the aborted 1970 lunar mission, and in 1995 he starred opposite Helen Hunt as the storm chaser Bill “the Extreme” Harding in the disaster movie Twister. In Sam Raimi’s A Simple Plan he played a man whose discovery of $4 million after an aeroplane crash does not turn out to be as fortuitous as he had hoped.
Paxton directed and starred in Frailty (2001) and The Greatest Game Ever Played (2005) and in 2014 he appeared alongside Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt in Edge of Tomorrow.
Latterly he starred in a number of successful television series including one about Mormons, Big Love (200611), for which he received three Golden Globe nominations, and the Western series Hatfields & McCoys (2012).
At the time of his death Paxton had just finished work on The Circle, an adaptation of Dave Eggers’ book about a sinister internet company.
Shortly before his death Paxton revealed that despite a 40-year career he still suffered from nerves. “Every time I get in front of that camera,” he admitted, “I have a bit of a panic attack.”
Bill Paxton was married to Kelly Rowan from 1979 to 1980. In 1987 he married Louise Newbury, who survives him with their son and daughter.