The actor who got a second shot with

Things weren’t going well for Robert Forster when he bumped into director Quentin Tarantino at a West Hollywood coffee shop in the mid-1990s. A promising talent in the 1960s, the ruggedly handsome actor had seen his career plummet for 27 years, reducing him to parts in grind-house flicks such as Maniac Cop III and Satan’s Princess. “I had four kids,” he said. “I took any job I could get.” Tarantino told Forster he was a fan of his early work and that he was writing an adaptation of Elmore Leonard’s novel Rum Punch. Forster thought little of the encounter, but six months later Tarantino returned to the coffee shop with the script for Jackie Brown (1997) and a big role for the 56-year-old Forster. His performance as Max Cherry, a bail bondsman who falls for Pam Grier’s title character, earned him an Oscar nomination and a career renaissance. “For a guy who could not get a job,” he said, “it’s just astounding.” Forster was born in Rochester, N.Y., to a homemaker mother and a father who trained circus elephants, said The Washington Post. He was studying at the University of Rochester, “mulling a career as a lawyer,” when he auditioned for a student production of Bye Bye Birdie to impress a girl in the play. He fell in love with acting, and after graduating appeared on Broadway in Mrs. Dally Has a Lover. Forster made his film debut in 1967’s Reflections in a Golden Eye, playing a soldier who “gallops naked through the woods atop a black stallion, catching the eye of Marlon Brando and Elizabeth Taylor.” Handed a tan jockstrap before filming, Forster tossed it aside, telling himself, “If you are afraid to be naked on this horse, you’d better quit.”

He won acclaim for his role in 1969’s Medium Cool, said VanityFair.com, playing a news cameraman caught up in the chaos of the 1968 Democratic National Convention. That led to lead roles in the NBC detective shows Banyon and Nakia, but both “were canceled after one season.” Forster then struggled for decades to win quality parts, but after Jackie Brown he was “inundated with offers,” said The Hollywood Reporter. He appeared in David Lynch’s 2001 movie Mulholland Drive, the reboot of TV’s Twin Peaks, and the hit show Breaking Bad. “If you’re going to get a warm streak in a career,” he said in 2014, “it’s nice to get it during the back end.”