Slim Pickens

Louis Burton Lindley Jr. came to acting out of the rodeo, and the arena never entirely left the performance. The credits here begin in the 1950s, in the western features that were then the industry's staple, The Outcast (1954), The Great Locomotive Chase (1956), The Sheepman (1958), Escort West (1959), alongside television westerns like Buffalo Bill Jr., Death Valley Days and Outlaws.

For most of his career he played cowboys, and he was cast for a voice: a high, dry, unhurried drawl that could carry a joke and a threat in the same sentence. One-Eyed Jacks (1961), opposite Marlon Brando, gave him a deputy with no bottom to him at all. Sam Peckinpah used him three times, in Major Dundee (1965), The Ballad of Cable Hogue (1970) and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973), the last of which contains the finest scene of his career.

Two comic roles fixed him in the culture. In Dr. Strangelove (1964) he is Major King Kong, the bomber commander who reads out the contents of a survival kit like a man taking inventory at a hardware store, and the satire lands partly because Pickens plays it entirely straight. Ten years later Blazing Saddles (1974) made him Taggart, the henchman who takes every idiotic order seriously.

The late work spread out of the westerns into everything: The Cowboys and The Getaway (both 1972), White Line Fever (1975), The White Buffalo (1977), The Swarm (1978), 1941 (1979), the voice of the robot B.O.B. in The Black Hole (1979), Tom Horn and Honeysuckle Rose (both 1980), and a small, warm turn in The Howling (1981). He died in 1983.