You see Gus Grissom hanging there: almost totally defeated, like a dead fish on the end of a line.” “And then they picked me up, dangling by a rescue noose. “I had a wet suit on under my flight suit, in pretty cold water,” Ward recalled. The 5-foot-9 Ward then did some amateur boxing, was a logger and lumberjack in Alaska, and landed parts in early plays written by his future Right Stuff co-star Sam Shepard in San Francisco.īack in the U.S., Ward appeared uncredited as a cowboy in Tony Bill’s Hearts of the West (1975), then got his first major role as a con who attempts a breakout with Clint Eastwood in Don Siegel’s Escape From Alcatraz (1979).ĭuring the making of The Right Stuff, Kaufman said Ward “almost died in the water” in Half Moon Bay during a scene in which Grissom bails from his capsule. After the service, he ventured to New York and studied acting at Herbert Berghof’s studio for six months in 1964. Air Force, serving as an airborne radar technician in Goose Bay, Labrador, Canada. Maybe that’s where my restlessness comes from. Then she married my stepfather, who was with the carnie. In five years, we lived in five different places. She left me with her mother in Texas while she went to New Orleans to set up a life for us. Alcohol was the real trouble, underneath all the rest. He was just the kind of man who got into trouble. “He was in jail when I was born, got out briefly to celebrate the birth and then went right back. “My father did a lot of time,” he told the Tribune. He moved around a lot as a youngster, with his dad often at odds with the law. Ward, however, did get two chances to play Earl Bass, the resilient Nevada handyman who fights off creepy crawlers, first in Tremors (1990) and then in a 1996 direct-to-video sequel.Īnd as astronaut Virgil “Gus” Grissom in Kaufman’s The Right Stuff (1983), Ward was “earthy and unpretentious in what is perhaps the film’s most demanding role,” THR wrote in its review.įrederick Joseph Ward was born in San Diego on Dec. However, despite a neat action sequence atop scaffolding covering the Statue of Liberty, the film did poorly at the box office, and the adventure, alas, ended just as it was getting started. Ward’s Remo was a New York cop who is taught martial arts skills by a Korean master (Joel Grey) as he becomes an assassin for a secret government agency. (It was directed by Guy Hamilton and written by Christopher Wood, veterans of 007 movies, and Ward signed on for three Remo Williams installments.) The Orion Pictures release, based on the popular The Destroyer novels, was designed to kick off a franchise centering on an American version of James Bond. His best chance at superstardom came when he was cast as the title character in Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins (1985). “My rear end seemed to have something to do with ,” he said in an interview with The Washington Post.įor Robert Altman, Ward was the head of studio security in The Player (1992) and shared Golden Globe and Venice Film Festival ensemble prizes for his performance in Short Cuts (1993). Ward also starred as hard-drinking expatriate author Henry Miller, who has a ménage-a-trois in Paris in 1931 with his wife (Uma Thurman) and another writer (Maria de Medeiros), in Philip Kaufman’s Henry & June (1990), the first NC-17 film to play in theaters. “In many ways, his work, like that of Robert Duvall, can be viewed as a meditation on America’s notions of masculinity.” “Ward has played many heroes, each with a subtlety that removed them from the cardboard cutout figures that they could have been,” the Chicago Tribune’s Julia Cameron wrote in a 1985 profile of the actor. Wolfgang Petersen, German Commander of 'Das Boot,' Dies at 81

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