Frederic Forrest, character actor known for Coppola films
Frederic Forrest, a malleable, wide-ranging screen actor who found his greatest fame in supporting roles, memorably playing a high-strung
Navy machinist in Francis Ford Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now” and snagging an Oscar nomination as Bette Midler’s love interest in “The Rose,” died June 23 at his home in Santa Monica, Calif. He was 86.
He was in hospice care for congestive heart failure, said his sister, Ginger Forrest Jackson.
Forrest, an unpretentious Texan who spent his boyhood summers baling hay and picking cotton, appeared in more than 80 movies and television shows, often playing lawmen, killers and psychopathic heavies. He could be coldblooded and threatening, as when he starred as the bandit Blue
Duck in “Lonesome
Dove” (1989), a miniseries adapted from the Larry McMurtry novel, but also showed a more delicate touch in movies like “Valley Girl” (1983), as the proprietor of a health-food restaurant and the hippie father to Deborah Foreman.
Although he was seldom cast in leading roles, Forrest found critical acclaim as a character actor, including in several films by Coppola.
The two first worked together on “The Conversation” (1974), a contemplative thriller that echoed through the Watergate era with its story of privacy, guilt, paranoia and conspiracy. The film hinged on a cryptic conversation recorded by surveillance expert Harry Caul (Gene Hackman), who tracks a young couple (Forrest and Cindy Williams) as they walk the noisy streets of San Francisco. A bit of sophisticated audio filtering allows Caul to hear Forrest’s ominous words, “He’d kill us if he got the chance,” shortly before a murder takes place.
Forrest teamed with Coppola again on “Apocalypse Now” (1979), a Vietnam War epic that starred Martin Sheen as Willard, an Army captain tasked with hunting down a renegade Special Forces operative (Marlon Brando). As Jay “Chef” Hicks, a former saucier from New Orleans, Forrest played one of several men enlisted to accompany Willard on a voyage upriver, into an increasingly violent jungle landscape.
“The Rose” received four Oscar nominations, including best actress for Midler and best supporting actor for Forrest. He lost to Melvyn Douglas for “Being There,” but the National Society of Film Critics named him the best supporting actor of 1979, jointly honoring his performances in “Apocalypse Now” and “The Rose.”
Forrest starred in TV movies including “Larry” (1974), as a man who was wrongly confined to a mental hospital, and “Ruby and Oswald” (1978), as assassin Lee Harvey Oswald. He later had featured roles in miniseries including “The Deliberate Stranger” (1986), as a Seattle detective chasing serial killer Ted Bundy, and played a police captain in the first season of “21 Jump Street” (1987).
His film credits included supporting roles in the western “The Missouri Breaks” (1976), starring Brando and Jack Nicholson; the “Chinatown” sequel “The Two Jakes” (1990), also with Nicholson; and Coppola’s “Tucker: The Man and His Dream” (1988), with Jeff Bridges. He also played a prosecutor investigating war crimes in Costa-Gavras’s “Music Box” (1989) and the white supremacist owner of a military surplus store in “Falling Down” (1993).
His last screen appearance was in the 2006 remake of “All the King’s Men,” as the father of a populist Southern politician (Sean Penn).
Forrest was married and divorced three times, to Nancy Whitaker, his college sweetheart; Marilu Henner, his co-star in “Hammett”; and Nina Dean, a British model turned photographer. His sister is his only immediate survivor.