Claude Akins

Claude Akins had one of the great American character-actor faces: heavy, amused, and able to turn mean between one line and the next. Born in Georgia in 1926, he worked from the early 1950s until his death in 1994, and for most of that stretch he was who a director hired when a scene needed somebody to push.

The early film run is enviable. From Here to Eternity, uncredited. Horrible in The Caine Mutiny. Mack in The Defiant Ones. The Reverend Jeremiah Brown in Inherit the Wind, whose revival sermon is the most frightening thing in a film otherwise set in a courtroom. Joe Burdette in Rio Bravo, whose arrest sets the entire siege in motion. He worked constantly in westerns and war pictures, Comanche Station, Merrill's Marauders, Return of the Seven, The Devil's Brigade, and spent a film under ape prosthetics as Aldo in Battle for the Planet of the Apes.

Television is where he became familiar. Combat!, Rawhide, Laramie, Riverboat, Zane Grey Theatre: the standard circuit, worked hard. Then two leads. Sonny Pruitt, the trucker in Movin' On, and Sheriff Lobo, the crooked and thoroughly likeable lawman he played on The Misadventures of Sheriff Lobo from 1979, which is broad, popular and a slightly unfair headline for the man from Rio Bravo. He played Theodore Roosevelt twice in the 1990s, in Sherlock Holmes: Incident at Victoria Falls and The Gambler Returns. Late on there was drive-in horror as well: Tentacles, Tarantulas: The Deadly Cargo, The Curse.