Powers Boothe
Actor who brought subtlety and restraint to bad guy roles
POWERS BOOTHE, who has died aged 68, possessed the squarejawed good looks and natural charisma of a Hollywood leading man, but developed a reputation as an actor who made an art form out of evil.
He played the messianic evangelist the Rev Jim Jones, turning an exodus to South America into a mass suicide, in the television film Guyana Tragedy: The Jim Jones Story (1980); Nick Nolte’s boyhood friend who goes astray in Extreme Prejudice (1987), and a traitor to his country, selling US secrets to the Soviet Union in the 1990 television film Family of Spies: The Walker Spy Ring.
In Oliver Stone’s biopic Nixon (1995) he was Alexander Haig, White House chief of staff during Watergate, at once obsequious and swaggering as he guides the president toward resignation.
Boothe won an Emmy best actor award for his performance as Jones, disintegrating from compassionate and charismatic clergyman to fascistic preacher, showing convincingly how his brainwashed followers could be so mesmerised by his power. He received a Screen Actors Guild Award nomination for Nixon, and another for his entertaining performance as the ruthless brothel-owner Cy Tolliver in the HBO western series Deadwood (2004-6).
In fact Boothe played many more sympathetic parts, including a highly rated outing as Raymond Chandler’s streetwise detective Philip Marlowe in the 1983 HBO series Philip Marlowe, Private Eye. He was a downed fighter pilot in the war drama Red Dawn (1984), and in John Boorman’s adventure film The Emerald Forest (1985) he played an engineer searching for his young son abducted by Indians.
But Boothe admitted he was attracted to bad-guy roles, to which he brought both subtlety and restraint. “It just seems … there is not only something fascinating for the public but also fascinating for an actor to find out what makes them tick, what gives them their drive, their motivation, their charm,” he explained.
The youngest of three sons, Powers Allen Boothe was born on June 1 1948 and grew up on a cotton farm in Snyder, Texas. He performed in plays at school and continued to act at Southwest Texas State University, from where he studied theatre at Dallas’s Southern Methodist University.
He began his professional career with the Oregon Shakespeare Company and made his film debut in 1977 in the Neil Simon comedy The Goodbye Girl. His Broadway debut came with a role as a cowboy in James Mcclure’s one-act play Lone Star (1979).
When Boothe won his Emmy in 1980, there was a Screen Actors Guild strike and he was the only star to accept his award (though he denied allegations that he had crossed a picket line to do so). His brief acceptance speech – “Thanks a lot. This is either the most courageous moment of my career or the dumbest, one or the other” – has become a classic of Hollywood lore.
Other roles included the National Guardsman Hardin in Walter Hill’s Louisianaset thriller Southern Comfort (1980); the gunman Curly Bill Brocius in Tombstone (1993); a rogue federal agent holding a hockey stadium hostage in Sudden Death (1995), and a corrupt senator in Sin City (2005). In the third series of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (2015-16) he was leader of the criminal organisation Hydra, a role he had first played in the 2012 film Marvel’s Avengers Assemble.
Although he specialised in baddies, Boothe had strict rules about the roles he would accept: “I will not do fluff,” he told an interviewer in 1990. “I won’t do something that will perpetuate evil for its own sake or exploitation for its own sake.”
Boothe’s first marriage to Pamela Cole was dissolved, and he married, secondly, Marlene Tochal-pennan, who survives him with two sons, and a son and daughter from his first marriage.
Powers Boothe, born June 1 1948, died May 14 2017