L.Q. Jones, the colourful character actor who labored on dozens of Westerns, together with the Sam Peckinpah classics The Wild Bunch and Journey the Excessive Nation as a member of the famed filmmaker’s common posse, has died. He was 94.
Jones died Saturday of pure causes at his residence within the Hollywood Hills, his grandson Erté deGarces informed The Hollywood Reporter.
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Jones portrayed ranch hand Andy Belden on 25 episodes of NBC’s The Virginian over an eight-year span, was one of many dangerous guys who slipped a noose over Clint Eastwood’s neck in Grasp ‘Em Excessive (1968) and performed a sheriff on the 1983-84 NBC primetime cleaning soap The Yellow Rose, starring Sam Elliott, Cybill Shepherd and Chuck Connors.
The Texas native additionally portrayed Clark County Commissioner Pat Webb, Robert De Niro’s nemesis, in Martin Scorsese’s On line casino (1995) and nation singer Chuck Akers in Robert Altman’s A Prairie Residence Companion (2006), his closing credit score.
In a profession that spanned greater than 5 many years, Jones is maybe greatest recognized for his flip because the bounty hunter T.C. in The Wild Bunch (1969). He and Strother Martin, as Coffer, “convey their wicked characters to life with a infantile vitality — they take nice enjoyment from making killing right into a contest as they jockey to assert who has a better physique depend after every bloody encounter.” That’s how a Warner Bros. web site selling the movie describes their performances.
Jones first labored with Peckinpah in 1960 on the short-lived NBC Western Klondike. He portrayed one of many 4 ruthless brothers who battle it out with Joel McCrea and Randolph Scott in Journey the Excessive Nation (1962) and was a accomplice soldier (and Warren Oates’ brother) in Main Dundee (1965).
He additionally performed no-good characters who meet their premature ends in Peckinpah’s The Ballad of Cable Hogue (1970) and Pat Garrett & Billy the Child (1973).
“Sam was a genius and I liked him, however he was a basket case. He drove all people nuts,” Jones mentioned in a 2017 interview with Nick Thomas.
On the opposite aspect of the digicam, Jones directed, co-wrote and produced A Boy and His Canine (1975), a cult black comedy set within the post-apocalyptic yr of 2024 that starred Don Johnson and Jason Robards and was primarily based on a novella by sci-fi legend Harlan Ellison.
He was born Justice Ellis McQueen Jr. on Aug. 19, 1927, in Beaumont, Texas, the son of a railroad employee. When he was younger, his mom, Jessie, was killed in an vehicle accident, and he was raised by kinfolk.
“I had a horse by the point I used to be 8 or 9 and grew up round powerful rodeo folks — my uncle was into roping — so Westerns had been simple and enjoyable,” he mentioned.
He served within the U.S. Navy and studied legislation on the College of Texas, the place his roommate was future Daniel Boone star Fess Parker. After faculty, he purchased a ranch in Nicaragua to make cash on beans, corn and dairy, however that didn’t go in addition to he had hoped.
Parker had moved to Hollywood and had appeared in a couple of movies when he despatched his faculty buddy a replica of the Leon Uris novel Battle Cry, which was about to turn into a big-budget Warner Bros. struggle film directed by Raoul Walsh. Parker was enjoying a soldier within the adaptation.
“Fess inspired me to return out and drew me a map on the again of a laundry-shirt stuffing displaying the best way to get to the studio,” he recalled. “Inside two days of arriving, I had the a part of [Pvt.] L.Q. Jones in Battle Cry and doubtless would by no means have been within the enterprise had it not been for Fess.”
McQueen favored the character’s identify a lot, he determined to undertake it as his stage identify.
The newly minted L.Q. Jones saved extraordinarily busy after that, showing on such reveals as Cheyenne, Gunsmoke, Laramie, Wagon Practice, Lassie, Rawhide, Johnny Ringo, The Large Valley and Perry Mason — generally doing two or three sequence per week — and in movies together with Goal Zero (1955) — his first of his many pairings with Martin, one other Peckinpah common — Elvis Presley’s Love Me Tender (1956) and Flaming Star (1960), Don Siegel’s Hell Is for Heroes (1962) and Walsh’s The Bare and the Lifeless (1958).
He mentioned Stanley Kubrick provided him the function of Main T.J. “King” Kong that went to Slim Pickens in Dr. Strangelove or: How I Realized to Cease Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), however he was “tied up with one other image” and needed to cross.
Engaged on a Peckinpah movie may very well be a problem, he famous in a wide-ranging interview for the web site Digicam within the Solar.
“Should you’re not standing in the identical place Sam envisioned it a thousand occasions for the yr — and he’s not informed anyone what it’s — however in case you’re not there in that individual place, he’s livid since you haven’t performed your job proper in his estimation. That incontrovertible fact that he hadn’t informed you something doesn’t make a distinction,” he mentioned. “And it doesn’t make a distinction whether or not you’re Invoice Holden or an additional. These of us who’d labored with him — you discover he had a bunch that labored with him his entire profession — simply realized the place to be, considering the best way Sam would assume.”
Within the mid-’60s, he and actor Alvy Moore shaped the manufacturing firm LQ/JAF, they usually made 4 movies: The Satan’s Bed room (1964), which Jones additionally directed; The Witchmaker (1969); The Brotherhood of Devil (1971), which he co-wrote; and A Boy and His Canine, which he mentioned served as George Miller’s inspiration for The Street Warrior.
“After doing A Boy and His Canine, I had a complete bunch of gives to direct and more cash than it value to make the image, for chrissakes,” he mentioned. “However I couldn’t see working all that point and all the trouble to make that. So I simply saved saying, ‘No,’ and I lastly simply mentioned, ‘To hell with it,’ and simply stopped and went on with the performing. As a result of by then I might fairly nicely choose and select what I wished to do.”
Survivors additionally embrace his kids, Randy, Steve and Mindy.
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