Oscar nominee was best known for ‘Jackie Brown,’ ‘Breaking Bad’
Robert Forster, a journeyman actor whose comeback role as a bail bondsman in Quentin Tarantino’s “Jackie Brown” earned him an Oscar nomination and who drew acclaim for his tough-guy appearances in “Breaking Bad,” died Friday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 78.
The cause was brain cancer, said Kathie Berlin, a longtime friend who handled his publicity.
Forster appeared in close to 200 films and television shows during his five-plus decades in show business. He made his movie debut in “Reflections in a Golden Eye,” a racy 1967 drama directed by John Huston and starring Marlon Brando and Elizabeth Taylor. In 1969, he played a newsman in “Medium Cool,” a Haskell Wexler-directed drama about a reporter who becomes involved in the violence in the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
By his own acknowledgment, Forster went through a midcareer slump that featured roles in films such as “The Delta Force” with Chuck Norris and Lee Marvin in 1986 and the 1980 horror movie “Alligator.”
It was on the set of “Alligator” that Forster met a young special effects assistant named Bryan Cranston, with whom he would later reunite in the critically acclaimed television series “Breaking Bad,” about a New Mexico chemistry teacher who turns to a life of crime, selling crystallized methamphetamine.
Forster and Cranston teamed up again in “El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie,” which was released Friday by Netflix and in some theaters. Forster, who learned of his brain cancer diagnosis in June, starred in two additional films that have yet to be released, friend Berlin said.
Forster was born Robert Wallace Foster Jr. on July 13, 1941, in Rochester, N.Y., according to Berlin, who said he later changed his surname to Forster because there was another actor with his name.
Forster, whose two marriages ended in divorce, is survived by his longtime partner, Denise Grayson; a son, Robert Forster Jr.; three daughters, Elizabeth Foster Howell, Maeghen Perry Dimperio and Kate Forster Simmons; and four grandchildren.