Scott Wilson, a Golden Globe-nominated actor best known for the 1967 film In Cold Blood and his three-season run on The Walking Dead as Hershel Greene, has died, according to The Hollywood Reporter. He was 76 years old and had been battling cancer.
Wilson was one of those character actors you knew you could rely on. Every time he swung by, in a film or on TV, you know he knew what he was doing. In Cold Blood was his breakthrough. He played Dick Hickock, one of two murderers, alongside Robert Blake’s Perry Smith. Blake was the film’s main focus, but Wilson had the trickier role: He was the less psychologically conflicted of the two, and therefore a creepier study in the banality of evil.
Wilson’s career never took off like Blake’s did, but he proved himself adept in’70s films like Robert Aldrich’s The Grissom Gang, Richard Fleischer’s cop saga The New Centurions, the Robert Redford-Mia Farrow version of The Great Gatsby, and 1976’s The Passover Plot, a bizarre conspiracy theory picture which posited that Jesus Christ (future softcore maven Zalman King) faked his death.
Wilson earned his only major award nomination for 1980’s The Ninth Configuration, a deeply strange and hectic drama about an insane asylum for soldiers, written and directed by The Exorcist creator William Peter Blatty. Wilson played an astronaut who lost his mind on a trip to the moon, scoring him a Golden Globe nom.
As Wilson got older, he only grew in demand, often cast as paternal figures, thanks to his sincere, open face. Some of his better turns are as one of the victims in the Aileen Wuornos docudrama Monster, a seriously taciturn father in Junebug, and, most recently, in the Western Hostiles, with Christian Bale and Rosamund Pike.
From 2011 to 2014, he played Hershel Greene, the devoutly religious widowed farm owner who goes from cranky to kind, on The Walking Dead. A mere hour before his death became public, the show’s showrunner, Angela Kang, at New York Comic Con, announced Wilson’s Hershel might have returned in season nine, despite having received a nasty two-part death. Wilson was one of several Walking Dead alum who shared a “death dinner.”
(Via THR)
