FREDERIC FORREST
(23 December 1936 - 23 June 2023)
The American actor Frederic Forrest, who has died aged 86 from congestive heart failure, was a skilled performer who never really became a Hollywood icon although he did work with many top directors, in particular Francis Ford Coppola. Frederic Fenimore Forrest Jr was born in Waxahachie, Texas, son of the furniture store owner Frederic Forrest Sr and his wife Virginia. Although he was nervous about being an actor, he later studied theatre arts at the Texas Christian University. Against his parents’ wishes, he moved to New York, studied with the acting teacher Sanford Meisner and was also tutored by Lee Strasberg. To pay for his tuition, Forrest worked as a page at the NBC TV studios.
Forrest Jr began acting in 1966 in an off-Broadway production of Viet Rock, an anti-Vietnam War musical presented at Cafe La Mama in East Village. It was at Actors Studio West that Forrest was spotted by director Stuart Millar who cast him in his first major film, When the Legends Die, in 1972. It starred Richard Widmark with Forrest playing an apprentice rodeo rider. He was so good in the part that he was nominated for a Golden Globe. A year later he played Tony Fargo in Richard Fleischer’s The Don Is Dead and was then chosen by Francis Ford Coppola for The Conversation, a thriller about a surveillance expert (Gene Hackman). Coppola went on to cast Forrest in Apocalypse Now (1979) as Jay ‘Chef’ Hicks for which Forrest won a National Film Critics’ award. Forrest then top-billed Coppola’s One From the Heart (1982), an ambitious musical romance with Forrest as a mechanic and with Teri Garr, Raul Julia and Nastassja Kinski in support.
Forrest worked again with Coppola who produced Wim Wenders’ Hammett, in which he starred as the crime novelist Dashiell Hammett, a role he played again in Citizen Cohn, Frank Pierson’s biopic of Joseph McCarthy’s chief counsel Roy Cohn. Forrest also had a supporting role in Coppola’s Tucker: The Man and His Dream, about the automobile inventor Preston Tucker (played by Jeff Bridges). Apart from these, other notable titles include Mark Rydell’s The Rose, with Bette Midler, for which he was nominated for an Oscar, a Golden Globe, a New York Critics’ and a National Critics’ award. He was in Arthur Penn’s The Missouri Breaks with Marlon Brando and Jack Nicholson, and Nicholson directed Forrest in The Two Jakes (1990), his sequel to Chinatown. In Joel Schumacher’s Falling Down (1993) Forrest appeared with Michael Douglas playing a divorcé having a very bad day. He played a prosecuting attorney in Costa-Gavros’ Music Box (1989), about the trial of a possible Nazi war criminal.
For television, Frederic Forrest worked with John Frankenheimer on Andersonville, about Union soldiers in the American Civil War. With Frankenheimer he was also in Path to War, a TV film, the director’s last, about the Vietnam war as viewed by Lyndon B Johnson. Forrest was also in Stephen Frears’ Saigon: Year of the Cat (1983) with Judi Dench, which was released theatrically overseas. Quo Vadis? was Franco Rossi’s 1985 miniseries with Forrest as Petronius and then the first season of 21 Jump Street (1987) with Johnny Depp.
Frederic Forrest’s last film appearance was as Donald Stark in the remake of All the King’s Men in 2006. Based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Robert Penn Warren, Steven Zaillian’s version starred Sean Penn as Governor Willie Stark (based on Huey Long). Frederic Forrest was first married to Nancy Ann Whittaker from 1960 to 1963. He then married the actress Marilu Henner in 1980 and they divorced in 1983.
MICHAEL DARVELL