LOS ANGELES • American actor Wilford Brimley, best known for his roles in the Oscar-winning movie Cocoon (1985) and Quaker Oats commercials, died at the age of 85 last Saturday.
He had been sick for two months with a kidney ailment, said his agent Lynda Bensky.
Utah-born Brimley found his way into the film industry through stunt work around horse riding, before taking on successively larger roles in his 40s and 50s which brought him fame playing sometimes gruff but lovable mustachioed seniors.
He had a recurring role on the television series The Waltons (1972 to 1981) when actor Michael Douglas, the producer of the 1979 film The China Syndrome, gave him his breakthrough role: Ted Spindler, an assistant engineer at a nuclear plant.
In the film's climactic scene, in which he is being interviewed by a crusading TV reporter played by actress Jane Fonda, Brimley delivered an impassioned defence of his boss (Jack Lemmon), who had precipitated a crisis to draw public attention to defects at the plant.
In an article for The New York Times (NYT) singling out Brimley as a talent to watch, film critic Janet Maslin called him "the mustachioed man who very nearly steals the ending of China Syndrome from Jane Fonda".
Brimley followed up with a small but memorable performance as a pugnacious district attorney in Absence Of Malice (1981) and with supporting roles in The Natural (1984), as the put-upon manager of a losing baseball team, and The Firm (1993), in which he acted alongside Tom Cruise and played the sinister head of security at an unsavoury law firm.
In director Ron Howard's 1985 fantasy film Cocoon, Brimley delivered one of his most engaging performances, as a retiree who, with actors Don Ameche and Hume Cronyn, regains his youth after swimming in a magic pool.
"Wilford's a testy guy, not an easy guy to work with all the time, but he has great instincts," Howard told NYT in 1985. "Many of his scenes were totally improvised."
In the 1980s and 1990s, Brimley was a television fixture as a spokesman for Quaker Oats, gruffly telling viewers to eat the cereal because "it's the right thing to do", and Liberty Medical, a company selling diabetes-testing supplies. Brimley learnt that he had the disease in the late 1970s.
When interviewed by Wyoming newspaper Powell Tribune in 2014, Brimley played down his talent.
"I can't talk about acting," he said. "I don't know anything about it. I was just lucky enough to get hired."
Brimley's first wife, actress Lynne Bagley, died in 2000. He is survived by his wife, Beverly, and three sons from his first marriage, James, John and William. Another son, Lawrence, died in infancy.
NYTIMES, REUTERS
