Veteran movie and tv actor Fred Ward, 79, greatest recognized for taking part in gruff, tough-guy roles in motion pictures similar to “Tremors,” “Escape from Alcatraz,” and “The Proper Stuff,” died on Sunday, his publicist mentioned on Friday .
No trigger or place of loss of life was launched, as per his household’s needs, publicist Ron Hofmann mentioned.
Ward took a roundabout means into performing, after serving three years within the US Air Power within the Sixties after which working as an Alaskan lumberjack, a boxer the place his nostril was damaged 3 times and a short-order cook dinner, in keeping with a biography supplied by Hofmann.
His profession spanned greater than 4 many years, beginning with international movies within the early Nineteen Seventies and stretched by way of 2015 together with his closing position within the tv sequence “True Detective,” in keeping with his on-line IMBD web page.
He made his first American movie look taking part in a cowboy within the 1975 movie, “Hearts of the West.” However his breakthrough position got here when he performed reverse Clint Eastwood within the 1979 movie “Escape from Alcatraz.”
“The distinctive factor about Fred Ward is that you just by no means knew the place he was going to pop up, so unpredictable have been his profession decisions,” the discharge mentioned.
He performed all the things from an astronaut, cowboy, Vietnam battle soldier, a chain-smoking police detective-turned-assassin, to a hero battling big worms, the discharge mentioned.
In 1983 he portrayed Mercury 7 astronaut Virgil “Gus” Grissom within the adaptation of Tom Wolfe’s e-book, “The Proper Stuff.” That very same yr he appeared within the motion film “Unusual Valor” with Gene Hackman and within the drama “Silkwood” with Meryl Streep.
Ward gained a Golden Globe and the Venice Movie Pageant ensemble prize for his efficiency in “Brief Cuts” in 1993, his biography mentioned.
He’s survived by his spouse of 27 years, Marie-France Ward, and a son, Django Ward.
