Wilford Brimley, the grandfatherly actor who appeared in some of the greatest films of the 1980s, passed away on Saturday according to a report in The New York Times. He was 85 years old.
The famously mustachioed Brimley was born in Salt Lake City in 1934. He served in the United States Marine Corps, stationed in the Aleutian Islands, and had a number of odd jobs prior to a career on-screen.
In addition to working as a blacksmith and ranch hand, he was a bodyguard for Howard Hughes. “He was a good guy,” Brimley, who was Mormon, told The Powell Tribune in 2014 regarding his famously eccentric old boss. Despite not being Mormon, Hughes made a point to specifically hire Mormon bodyguards, which aided him in getting the unusual gig.
Brimley took a unique route to Hollywood: through horse feet. He shoed horses all over the West, eventually working for television production companies. This led to extra work on shows like Gunsmoke and Bonanza. In time he scored a recurring role on The Waltons, as “Horace Brimley”.
He got his big break in 1979’s The China Syndrome, opposite Jack Lemmon, Jane Fonda, and Michael Douglas, as an engineer at a nuclear power plant. The film was a sensation at the time, owing in part to its release a mere 12 days prior to the accident at Three Mile Island. Brimley was the face of the put-upon working man caught up in a conspiracy.
His next two theatrical films starred Robert Redford, The Electric Horseman and Brubaker. Horseman’s director Sydney Pollack cast him again in Absence of Malice, in which he played a district attorney opposite Paul Newman and Sally Field in an explosive libel case. And then, in 1982, he ended up part of an Antarctic science team facing an existential crisis of alien origin in John Carpenter’s masterpiece The Thing.
As the station biologist Blair, Brimley is first to realize just how dangerous the invading organism is, and his turn from a kindly ol’ grandpappy into an axe-wielding man of action is one of the film’s most frightening non-gore moments.
Brimley was quite prolific during this period, but a standout from 1983 was Bruce Beresford’s Tender Mercies. Brimley plays the friend and would-be manager for Robert Duvall, a washed-up country western singer. Duvall won a best actor Oscar (as did writer Horton Foote) for the film, which was also nominated for best picture.