MICHAEL J. POLLARD

(30 May 1939 - 20 November 2019)

The American actor Michael J. Pollard, who has died from a heart attack at the age of 80, will be remembered for one role in particular, although he had a long career in film and television lasting for over fifty years. That one role was as one of the accomplices of Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow (played by Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty) in Bonnie and Clyde, Arthur Penn’s 1967 film about the 1930s gun-toting bank robbers. Pollard played C.W. Moss, the couple’s driver and mechanic, for which he received an Oscar nomination. His Actors’ Studio training (with Marilyn Monroe, no less) was put to good use in his amusing, mumbling, naturalistic performance, coupled with his angelic, curly-mopped face. Pollard had done a lot of acting before and Warren Beatty discovered him when they worked together in the theatre. After quite a bit of stage work, Pollard broke into television in 1958 but his first film was It Happened to Jane (1958), in an uncredited role with Doris Day and Jack Lemmon. Much more TV saw him into the 1960s when other films came along – Martin Ritt’s Adventures of a Young Man with Richard Beymer, Franklin J. Schaffner’s Woman of Summer with Joanne Woodward and Beymer again, and Summer Magic with Hayley Mills. More TV kept him busy until Norman Jewison’s The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming! Then Roger Corman’s The Wild Angels saw him working with Peter Fonda, Nancy Sinatra and Bruce Dern. Enter Laughing was Carl Reiner’s comedy about a young tyro actor, and Caprice was with Doris Day again plus Richard Harris. After Bonnie and Clyde there was James Goldstone’s Jigsaw, Michael Winner’s Hannibal Brooks, Little Fauss and Big Halsy (as Little Fauss) with Robert Redford, and a starring role in Dirty Little Billy (as Billy the Kid). Pollard co-starred with Ernest Borgnine in Sunday in the Country and played ‘The Hawker’ in Between the Lines, about an underground Boston newspaper, and he was Little Red in Melvin and Howard about the millionaire Howard Hughes. Other of Pollard’s films included The Patriot, America, The American Way and Roxanne. He was in Scrooged, an update of A Christmas Carol, Next of Kin with Patrick Swayze and Liam Neeson, Tango & Cash with Sylvester Stallone, and Warren Beatty’s Dick Tracy. In the 1990s and from 2000 onwards, he made many films but nothing particularly interesting, did more TV and played himself in Remembering Nigel. His last film, The Next Cassavetes, is still in post-production. Michael J. Pollard married and divorced actress Beth Howland (she died in 2015) and they have a daughter, Holly. He also married and divorced Annie Tolstoy and they have a son, Axel.

MICHAEL DARVELL