Wilford Brimley, the cowboy who played old men before he was old

Wilford Brimley

Photo: Marc Majcher / CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	September 27, 1934 Salt Lake City, Utah, United States
Died	August 1, 2020 (85)
Occupation	Actor
Known for	The Thing, The Firm, True Grit
Awards	Golden Boot

In Ron Howard’s Cocoon, Wilford Brimley leads a band of retirees who sneak into a neighbour’s swimming pool and climb out feeling young again. The joke buried in the casting is that Brimley needed no pool. He was decades younger than the men splashing beside him, and the grey in his hair and moustache came out of a bottle. Hollywood had decided what he was long before he arrived: an old man, gruff and plain-spoken, the sort who fixes your tractor and tells you what he thinks of your haircut. He played that man so well, for so long, that audiences rarely asked who was underneath.

The answer sits a long way from a soundstage. Brimley grew up in Salt Lake City, the son of a real-estate broker, and walked out of high school at fourteen to work as a cowboy on ranches across the West. He served in the Marines on the Aleutian Islands, guarded the businessman Howard Hughes, worked as a wrangler and as a blacksmith. Shoeing horses for film and television crews put him at the edge of the business. His friend Robert Duvall pushed him the rest of the way.

The westerns of the 1960s used him as a riding extra and stuntman, a man who could sit a horse convincingly at the back of a shot. He had no formal training; his first experience in front of a live audience came with a theatre group at the Los Angeles Actors’ Theater. In 1979 he told the Los Angeles Times that the most he had ever earned from acting in a single year was $20,000. Born in September 1934, he was by then in his mid-forties, the age at which most actors with his résumé start looking for another trade.

Television found him first, as the blacksmith Horace Brimley in The Waltons, seven appearances between 1974 and 1977. His first credited feature, The China Syndrome in 1979, cast him as Ted Spindler, the plant worker at Jack Lemmon’s side in a nuclear thriller that opened twelve days before the accident at Three Mile Island. Two years later Sydney Pollack gave him a late, blunt entrance in Absence of Malice as the assistant attorney general James A. Wells, a few minutes of screen time that decide how the film ends.

Then came John Carpenter‘s The Thing in 1982. As Blair, the biologist at an American research station in Antarctica, Brimley is the first man to understand what the shape-shifting organism can do and the first to come apart because of it. It is the least grandfatherly performance he ever gave, and the one that has aged best.

Duvall brought him onto Tender Mercies in 1983, wanting, in his words, somebody on set who was on his side. The director, Bruce Beresford, thought Brimley was too old for the part of Harry. When Beresford later tried to tell him how Harry would behave, Duvall remembered the reply: “Until you fire me or get another actor, I’m Harry, and whatever I do is fine ’cause I’m Harry.” A year later he was Pop Fisher, the worn-out manager of a losing baseball club, opposite Robert Redford in The Natural.

Cocoon in 1985 was his first leading role. Brimley was 49 when he was cast as Ben Luckett and turned 50 during filming, at least twenty years younger than any of the actors playing his fellow residents; make-up drew the wrinkles and liver spots on his face. Of Howard, then barely past thirty, he said later: “He was a kid. He got a lot older doing that movie.” The sequel, Cocoon: The Return, followed in 1988, and NBC built the family drama Our House around him as a widowed grandfather from 1986.

The image paid well and cost him something. From 1987 the Quaker Oats campaign made him the face of the line “It’s the right thing to do”, and the persona became a brand. His later commercials for Liberty Medical, which delivered diabetes supplies, gave the internet “diabeetus”, a meme built on his pronunciation. It reduced a man who had lived with type 2 diabetes since 1979, who visited veterans’ hospitals to talk patients through the disease and whom the American Diabetes Association honoured in 2008, to a funny word. The folksy reading also misses how often directors turned his reassurance against the audience. In The Firm in 1993 he is William Devasher, the soft-voiced security chief of a mob-linked law firm, and the menace works precisely because he looks like the man who should be protecting Tom Cruise.

He kept working without chasing Hollywood. In 1997 he was the United States Postmaster General who frightens Kramer out of his mail boycott in Seinfeld, and Kevin Kline’s father in In & Out. After that he drifted toward independent productions, returning in the television western Crossfire Trail with Tom Selleck in 2001 and trading lines with Hugh Grant in Did You Hear About the Morgans? in 2009. He also sang. He self-released an album of jazz standards, This Time, The Dream’s On Me, in 2004, and recorded Home on the Range with Riders in the Sky in 2013. The Golden Boot Awards, which honour work in westerns, gave him their prize in 2005.

Brimley was a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He married Lynne Bagley in 1956; they had four sons, and she died in 2000. In 2007 he married Beverly Berry, and they divided their time between Greybull, Wyoming, and Santa Clara, Utah, where in 2009 they founded the nonprofit Hands Across the Saddle. He died on August 1, 2020, in a hospital in St. George, Utah, aged 85, after two months of kidney illness.

Watch The Thing and Cocoon back to back and the act behind the moustache becomes visible. The old men Brimley played were the ranch hands and blacksmiths he had worked beside for decades, and he never played them as quaint. Hollywood cast him for comfort; the films that last are the ones that let him be hard.

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