Joe Don Baker, the protagonist turned into a characters who broke playing Sheriff Buford Pusser in the 1973 film “Walking Tall”, has died, his family announced online.
The hard guy born in Texas died on May 7 at age 89. There was no cause of death. Baker lived in southern California when he died.
“Joe Don was a lighthouse of goodness and generosity … Throughout his life, Joe Don played many lives with his warmth and compassion, leaving an indelible brand in all the lucky ones to meet him,” his family said.
Born on February 12, 1936, in Groesbeck, Texas, Baker played football and basketball enough to obtain a sports scholarship for northern Texas State College, now Universidad del Norte de Texas, where he obtained a degree in Business Administration in 1958 and bought at the Fternal Sigma Phi Epsilon.
Baker entered the US Army. UU. For two years and then emerged in New York, where he studied in the study of actors and acted on stage. His career as an actor took off in the mid -1960s when he moved to Los Angeles, where he began with television roles in programs such as “The High Chaparral” and “Mission: Impossible” before taking the center of attention as the protagonist in films such as “Walking Tall” and “Final Justice”.
When he aged in the work of characters actors, he played Claude Kersak in the new version of “Cape Fear” of 1991 of “Cape Fear”, Olaf Anderson in the Eddie Murphy movie in 1992 “The Distinguished Gentleman” and Tom Pierce in “Reality Bites” of 1994 Living Daylights “, with Timothy Dalton as Bond, and then CIA Agent Jack Wade in two Bond films starring Pierce Brosnan:” Goldeneye “in 1995 and” Tomorrow Dies “in 1997.
He also spent a lot of time working on television, playing the role of the police for the title in “Eischied” in 1979, often portrayed the law officers: Big Jim Folsom in the 1997 miniseries “George Wallace” and innumerable roles in programs that include “Ironside”, “The Streets of San Francisco”, “Gunsmoke” and “Mod Squad”.
Joe Don Baker exercised a great stick in “Walking Tall”, the 1973 film based on the life of the Sheriff of Tennessee Buford Pusser.
(Los Angeles Times)
While moving between television and cinema, Baker was ahead of the curve by declaring Hollywood creativity.
“In Hollywood, they have scared all good writers,” he told The Times in 1986 when he promoted the miniseries manufactured by the BBC “Edge of Darkness” and strongly favoring foreign work on the domestic. “You never know the writer when you are making a television film in the United States: they are too embarrassed to appear and see how their work has been destroyed by some committee.
“I hate the idea of appearing in another television film in the United States,” he continued. “Everything that matters to them here is if you remember the words. In England they take the time to do everything good. I was there for six months to do six hours. That is a little more than double the time it would take to the United States.”
In the United States, Baker said: “By when networks are worried about who they are going to mark, they end with nothing.”
He said it was difficult to make US studies interested in something different. “They want enormous budgets, which are easier to steal. Studies do not seem to mind losing hundreds of millions, they can cancel everything. The rest of us can pay to see their bad movies or be taxed to cover their cancellations.”
But “Walking Tall”, the film that did it, was based on the true story of a Sheriff of Tennessee whose life became tragic by criminals. During his six years in office, the true Pusser, known for carrying a large walnut stick that he used as a weapon, fought against a gang of smugglers and scammers who operated along the Mississippi-Tennessee state line. He was shot and stabbed several times and killed an owner of Ladronal Motel who ambushed him. Then, in 1967, he was treated in his car by criminals who shot him and killed his wife, Pauline. Pusser became a known figure at the national level thanks to the coverage in Network News.
Although the film took the usual freedoms of Hollywood with Pusser's life, the film played as a pure piece of American neoalism: the public saw a strong family man who gets politically involved only after being deceived in a local casino, beaten and left by Dead. Chosen to the Sheriff, becomes motivated, fighting the local criminal union, corrupt judges and state government officials. The movie packed an emotional blow.
However, it was not an instant success when it was first launched in urban theaters and sold as a drama of the law and order of the southern children of the child.
“The initial ads made me out of a swamp with a slime that came out of me and I had this small stick in my hand,” Baker told Times in 2004, when a new significantly reinvented version came out “Walking Tall” starring Dwayne Johnson. “They were only terrible ads.” But the huge success in Asian markets led to a new marketing campaign that made the film an American success.
“They rarely offered me good parts now,” he said in 2004. “I had better parts before becoming a call star in 'Walking Tall'”.
In a 2000 humor column, the former Times columnist, Chris Erskine, called Baker “one of the best bad actors in history.”
Good or not, he won a Robert Altman award at the Film Independent Spirit Awards in 2014 for his work in the movie Matthew McConaughey 2012 “MUD”, where he played the father of a murdered man. It would be his final work before retiring.
Baker was married for 11 years with Maria Dolores Rivero-Torres; The two had no children. A voracious reader and lover of cats and nature, the member of the life of the study of actors “is cried by a small but very close circle of friends who will miss him forever,” said his family.
A funeral will take place on Tuesday morning at Utter McKinley Mortuary in Mission Hills.
The independent writer Lewis Beale contributed to this report.
