FRED WARD
(30 December 1942 – 8 May 2022)
The American actor and producer Fred Ward, who has died aged 79, was rarely a star in films but always supplied good back-up to the leading man, usually in an action movie requiring some guts rather than good looks. He appeared in some high-profile movies such as Escape from Alcatraz with Clint Eastwood, Walter Hill's Southern Comfort, Philip Kaufman's The Right Stuff, Jonathan Demme's Swing Shift, Ron Underwood's Tremors (and its first sequel), and two films by Robert Altman, The Player and Short Cuts.
His rather blunt-sounding name belies his birth moniker of Freddie Joe Ward who was born in San Diego to a part Cherokee family. His father was an alcoholic who was in jail when Freddie was born, so his mother Juanita divorced him when Freddie was just three. They moved on and his mother remarried a carnival worker. Before taking up acting, Ward was in the US Air Force and became a boxer, a lumberjack, a caretaker and a short-order cook. After studying acting at the Herbert Bergdorf Studio in Greenwich Village, New York, he moved to Italy and, when in Rome, dubbed Italian films into English, as well as doing work as a mime artist. He was also employed by Roberto Rossellini in the television mini-series L'Eta di Cosimo de Medici (The Age of the Medici, 1973), a history of Italy as seen through the eyes of the Medici family, with Ward playing Niccolo de' Conti, the 15th-century Italian explorer. Rossellini also cast him in Cartesius (1974) a TV film on the life of the French philosopher Rene Descartes.
On his return to America, Fred Ward was cast in an uncredited role in Hearts of the West (1975), Howard Zieff's comedy with Jeff Bridges. He was then in Don Siegel's Escape from Alcatraz, with Clint Eastwood, as one of the brothers involved in the break-out. He then played Lenny in Rudy Durand's Tilt (1979) with Charles Durning as a pinball champion, and then Jamie in Carny, about a travelling carnival show, with Gary Busey and Jodie Foster. Ward's roles were gradually improving, as in Walter Hill's Southern Comfort (1981) about the Louisiana National Guard on manoeuvres, with Keith Carradine and Powers Boothe.
There were good roles in Silkwood (1983), with Mike Nichols directing Meryl Streep as a nuclear whistleblowing activist, and Philip Kaufman's The Right Stuff (1983) in which he played Gus Grissom, one of the seven test pilots involved in trials of high-speed aircraft. The latter bombed at the box office but was a hit on video and won four Oscars. Jonathan Demme's Swing Shift (1984), with Goldie Hawn as a World War II armaments worker, also bombed despite good reviews.
In 1985, Ward finally got top-billing in the title role of Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins (aka Remo: Unarmed and Dangerous), Guy Hamilton's action adventure. Planned to be a series, its performance at the box-office scuttled that idea. Following some fairly routine pictures, Ward appeared with Dennis Hopper, Jodie Foster, Dean Stockwell, Vincent Price and John Turturro in Catchfire (1990), a romantic thriller which Hopper directed but then disowned before its release, so the pseudonym of Alan Smithee was substituted. It didn't rate at the box-office or with the critics. Two years later Hopper re-cut the film, adding nearly twenty minutes to its running time and it reappeared as Back Track under his own name to much praise on VHS, DVD and Blu-Ray. The screenplay was co-written by Alex Cox and included cameos from Charlie Sheen, Joe Pesci, Catherine Keener and Bob Dylan.
Big Business (1988), intended for Barbra Streisand, starred Bette Midler and Lily Tomlin as two pairs of twins in a comedy of manners, after which it was back to Vietnam action with Willem Dafoe and Gregory Hines in Christopher Crowe's Off Limits. Ward then played Henry Miller with Uma Thurman as his wife June for Philip Kaufman's Henry and June, a biopic set in Paris in the 1930s and based on Anaïs Nin's book. Then Ward appeared in and was executive producer of Miami Blues, a Jonathan Demme black comedy with Alec Baldwin and Jennifer Jason Leigh. Tremors was probably the actor’s biggest hit with its story of worm-like monsters rampaging the Nevada Desert. Both Ward and Kevin Bacon also appeared in the prequel, Tremors 2: Aftershocks, but not in the straight-to-video sequels or the TV series.
Following his time with Robert Altman on The Player (1992), Ward filmed Bob Roberts with Tim Robbins playing a right-wing politician, and then he worked again with Altman on Short Cuts (1993). Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult found him with Leslie Nielsen in the last of the comedies based on the Police Squad TV series. Ward continued to be in demand for both films and television until 2015. On TV he appeared in The Incredible Hulk, Quincey, M.E., The Hitchhiker, Gun, Invasion: Earth, Dice, 10.5, Grey's Anatomy, In Plain Sight, E.R., Leverage and True Detective alongside other TV movies. Ward was a good actor who maybe didn't get the breaks in enough good films to show just how fine he was as a supporting player.
Fred Ward was married first to Silvia Ward with whom he has a son, Django. He later married Carla Evonne Stewart and then Marie-France Ward from 1995 until his death. He received a Golden Globe, along with the rest of the cast of Short Cuts, and also won the Volpi Cup at the Venice Film Festival, along with the Short Cuts cast again.
MICHAEL DARVELL