L.Q. JONES
(19 August 1927 – 9 July 2022)
The American actor, producer and director L.Q. Jones, who has died from natural causes aged 94, was noted mainly for appearing in Westerns and on television. In the 1960s and 1970s, he became part of the Sam Peckinpah company, appearing in most of the writer-director’s films, including Ride the High Country, Major Dundee, The Wild Bunch, The Ballad of Cable Hogue and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. The Western series he worked on included Cheyenne, Gunsmoke, Laramie, Two Faces West, Lawman, Wagon Train, Tales of Wells Fargo, Have Gun - Will Travel, Rawhide, The Big Valley and The Virginian.
He was born Justus Ellis McQueen Jr in Beaumont, Texas, the son of Justus Ellis McQueen Sr, a railroad worker, and his wife Jessie. He was educated in Port Neches, Texas and, following graduation, served in the US Navy. He then studied law, business and journalism at the University of Texas in Austin. Before taking up acting, however, he was involved in professional baseball and football, did some stand-up comedy work and became a rancher in Nicaragua.
At the behest of his old friend, the actor Fess Parker, L.Q. Jones made his film debut in Battle Cry (1955), Raoul Walsh's World War II drama with Van Heflin and Aldo Ray. It was based on the former Marine Leon Uris's novel which he adapted for the cinema. In it, L.Q. Jones played Private L.Q. Jones, a name he liked so much that he adopted it as his professional name. He then appeared in three episodes of Cheyenne, the TV series starring Clint Walker. His next film was Don Siegel’s An Annapolis Story (1955, aka The Blue and the Gold or Navy Air Patrol) with John Derek, a drama set during the Korean War.
There were more war films during the 1950s including Target Zero, Santiago, Toward the Unknown, Between Heaven and Hell, Men in War, The Young Lions, The Naked and the Dead, Torpedo Run and Battle of the Coral Sea. There was some occasional light relief with such titles as Love Me Tender, a Western with Richard Egan and introducing Elvis Presley, Operation Madball, Richard Quine’s comedy with Jack Lemmon, and Hound-Dog Man, Don Siegel’s family musical about a raccoon hunt, with Fabian and Carol Lynley.
The call of the West for Jones began in 1957 with Gunsight Ridge starring Joel McCrea in which Jones played the Lazy Heart Ranchhand. It was followed by Buchanan Rides Alone, a superb Budd Boetticher oater starring Randolph Scott (pause for adoring intake of breath) with Jones as Pecos Hill. He was then uncredited as Fenn Jiggs in Warlock, Edward Dmytryk's classic Western with Richard Widmark, Henry Fonda and Anthony Quinn. For Disney's Ten Who Dared, Jones fared better, billed sixth in the part of Billy ‘Missouri’ Hawkins with a cast including Brian Keith, James Drury, Ben Johnson and R.G. Armstrong.
L.Q. Jones was not an actor whom audiences would know and instantly recognise, but he made a lot of films in his time as well as being near-indispensable in TV Westerns. He was never really a typical heavy in movies as he played a wide range of characters, although he was obviously a strong performer, a man's man who would take no messing from anyone else and, like Warren Oates or Jack Elam, he gave his roles a certain quality or edge, employing different shades of heaviness. His favourite directors were Raoul Walsh, Martin Scorsese and Sam Peckinpah, because he reckoned they knew what they were doing, although he admitted that Peckinpah was both a genius and an idiot.
Apart from the films already mentioned, he graced Don Siegel’s Hell is for Heroes, Ted Post’s Hang ’Em High, with Clint Eastwood, Don Medford’s The Hunting Party with Oliver Reed, Candice Bergen and Gene Hackman, Jonathan Kaplan’s White Line Fever, Peter Yates’ Mother, Jugs and Speed, Paul Hogan’s Lightning Jack, Scorsese’s Casino, Martin Campbell's The Mark of Zorro and A Prairie Home Companion, both Robert Altman’s and L.Q. Jones’s final movie, in 2006. In all he was in some 180 films and TV shows over a period of more than fifty years. He also produced and directed some films including The Devil's Bedroom, a Western drama in 1964, in which he also appeared, and A Boy and His Dog, a sci-fi black comedy with Don Johnson and Jason Robards in 1975, which won the science fiction Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation.
L.Q. Jones was a practising Methodist and an avowedly staunch Republican. He married Neta Sue Lewis in 1950. They have three children, Randy, Steve and Mindy. They divorced in 1979.
MICHAEL DARVELL