BO HOPKINS
(2 February 1938 – 28 May 2022)
He was never a big movie or television star, but the American actor Bo Hopkins made a solid career in supporting roles playing lawmen, cowboys, villains and the odd and possibly eccentric sadist. On TV he was in the very popular soap Dynasty and appeared in many other series. For the cinema he worked with the directors Sam Peckinpah, George Lucas, Alan Parker, Richard Quine, William A. Fraker, John Schlesinger, Ron Howard and Oliver Stone, among others. And he acted opposite stars such as Kirk Douglas, William Holden, Ernest Borgnine, Robert Ryan, Lee Marvin, Burt Reynolds, Richard Dreyfuss and Harrison Ford.
Bo Hopkins, who has died following a heart attack at the age of 84, was born William Mauldin Hopkins in Greenville, South Carolina. When he was nine years old he was adopted by a childless couple, the millworker Johnnie Hopkins and his wife. Johnnie died prematurely at the age of 39, so Billy, as Bo was then known, and his mother moved away to where his grandfather worked. Billy's mother eventually remarried but Billy fought with his stepfather and went back to live with his grandparents. He did eventually meet his birth mother.
Appearing in local stage productions, he won a scholarship to study acting at the Pioneer Playhouse in Kentucky from where he eventually moved to New York. He acquired the name of Bo from a character he played in Bus Stop, his first off-Broadway play. Moving to Los Angeles, he studied at the Actors Studio and the Red Studios Hollywood under Uta Hagen. Then he began to get work in both films and television. His first TV appearance was on The Phyllis Diller Show in 1966 which was followed by stints on The Virginian, Gunsmoke, Bonanza, Ironside and Hawaii Five-O.
In 1968 he made his first film appearance as a taxi driver in Dayton's Devils, a crime caper with Leslie Nielsen and Rory Calhoun. A year later he was in Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch and John Guillermin's The Bridge at Remagen. Richard Quine's The Moonshine War (1970) was a crime comedy written by Elmore Leonard and starred Patrick McGoohan and Richard Widmark. He continued to play supporting character roles in some quite honourable films such as William A. Fraker's Monte Walsh with Lee Marvin, Dick Richards' The Culpepper Cattle Co (the first film to give a credit to the producer Jerry Bruckheimer), and Sam Peckinpah's The Getaway with Steve McQueen and Ali MacGraw.
Hopkins made his mark as 'Little' Joe Young in George Lucas's American Graffiti (1973, and its sequel, More American Graffiti, 1979) and as Roy Boone in Joseph Norton's moonshining movie White Lightning with Burt Reynolds. And so his career continued in such major films as Schlesinger's The Day of the Locust, Kirk Douglas's Posse, Peckinpah's The Killer Elite and Alan Parker's Midnight Express (1978). Hopkins still appeared on television during the 1970s and ‘80s in Barnaby Jones, Charlie's Angels, The Rockford Files etc until Dynasty came along in 1981, in which he played the geologist Matthew Blaisdel, unhappily married to Claudia, and also the ex-lover of Krystle (Linda Evans), the wife of Blake Carrington (John Forsythe).
After that there was a lot more television until the year 2000, plus further feature films, although few were of the calibre of Hopkins' earlier appearances. Perhaps his most interesting later work included Oliver Stone's U Turn (1997), a crime thriller with Sean Penn, Jennifer Lopez and Nick Nolte, Richard Linklater's The Newton Boys (1998) about a family of bank robbers with Matthew McConaughey and Ethan Hawke, in which he played an FBI agent, and a starring role in Scott Spiegel's From Dawn to Dusk 2: Texas Blood Money which went straight to video in 1999. Hopkins' last film was Ron Howard's Hillbilly Elegy with Amy Adams and Glenn Close, in 2020.
Bo Hopkins was married to Sian Eleanor Green from 1989 and they have a son, Matthew. He was previously married to Norma Lee Woodle from 1959 to 1962. They have a daughter, Jane.
MICHAEL DARVELL