American actor Sam Elliott is known for playing gun-slinging cowboys in films subsequent to ‘The Quick and the Dead’ and ‘Tombstone,’ as competently as his role in the cult favorite ‘The Big Lebowski.’
Who Is Sam Elliott?
Born as regards August 9, 1944, Elliott made his immense screen debut in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969). Through the 1970s, he found steady loan on the order of TV shows such as Gunsmoke, and later earned terrific fans once 1989’s Road House. In 1998, Elliott appeared in the popular film The Big Lebowski. Throughout his career, he has played cowboys concerning TV and in films, including The Quick and the Dead and Tombstone. Going mighty into his 70s, the actor earned an Academy Award nomination for his supporting role in A Star Is Born (2018).
Early Life
Born in the region of August 9, 1944, in California, Sam Elliott grew going on in Oregon, where he spent his era exploring the outdoors and watching movies. By the period he was 9 years earliest, he had settled as regards a career in acting. His father, who worked for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, was skeptical of his son’s chosen profession. The two were unable to resolve those differences in the by now the senior Elliott died of a heart forcefulness back Sam was 18 years early.
“He died thinking, ‘Man, this kid is going to go all along the incorrect alley,'” Elliott said in a higher interview. “And I think upon some levels that was either hard upon me or made me more focused in my resolve to have a career.”
Acting Debut: ‘Butch Cassidy’
Elliott moved out to Hollywood and landed his first ascribed role: an atmosphere in the 1969 classic Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, in which Robert Redford and Paul Newman wowed audiences as the titular pair of Western outlaws. Elliott’s role, “Card Player No. 2,” was somewhat less prominent (“I think I was a shadow on the subject of a wall or something,” he joked).
As a bit artiste, Elliott never got a fortuitous to speak considering the film’s leading woman, actress Katharine Ross, who was cast as Redford’s fanatic. Nearly a decade in addition to, however, Elliott and Ross would meet considering again even if upon the film The Legacy (1978). They soon fell in high regard. “Not a good film, but a legacy nonetheless for Katharine and me,” Elliott quipped. Elliott and Ross married in 1984 and have one daughter.
Seeking His Own Path
Through the 1970s, Elliott found steady play in-exploit in television roles upon shows such as Mission: Impossible, Gunsmoke and Hawaii Five-O. He in addition to played Evel Knievel in a TV biopic very more or less the legendary motorcycle-jumping daredevil.
Though Elliott’s supreme looks could have placed him squarely in the heartthrob category, he shunned a enough Hollywood career. He not unaccompanied refused typical leading man roles, but began maintaining what would become his signature long hair and handlebar mustache (which he says takes “months, several months” to ensue message if shaved off for a role). “I don’t nonattendance to be known as a sex fable,” he told Playgirl magazine in 1976. “There’s a immense stigma that goes once that tag. I nonattendance to be a Sam Elliott.”
‘Mask’ and ‘Road House’
Being “a Sam Elliott” expected taking on more challenging, supporting roles in a broad array of films. In 1985, Elliott starred opposite Cher and Eric Stoltz in Mask, a the theater based concerning the definite defense of Rocky Dennis, a boy who suffered from craniodiaphyseal dysplasia, a scarce and disfiguring illness.
Three years difficult, Elliott earned gigantic fans once 1989’s Road House, playing the mentor to Patrick Swayze’s James Dalton, a bouncer as soon as a profound appendix.
Playing the Stranger in ‘The Big Lebowski’
The actor’s most beloved role, however, may have been his be responsive as the Stranger, the perplexing narrator of the Coen Brothers’ cult eternal The Big Lebowski (1998), which yet inspires fans to slope him in the street begging him to publicize, just along with, “The Dude abides.”
Western Films
Elliott may be best known for his take movement portraying Western heroes and outlaws. Over the course of his career, he has played gun-slinging cowboys in both television shows and films including The Quick and the Dead (1987), Houston: The Legend of Texas (1986), Tombstone (1993) and You Know My Name (1999). For his performance as an on the subject of-screen cowboy, Elliott was inducted in 2007 into the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum. Elliott has said of his penchant for Westerns: “I think it has something to realize along in the company of than integrity and a man’s word and recognition and all that user-understandable of stuff values, morality, all that nice of stuff that everybody looks realizable of plus to their nose at.”
Later Film and TV Work
In recent years Sam Elliott has played Lee Scoresby in 2007’s The Golden Compass, the first film based upon Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy; a pilot in 2009’s Up in the Air; and the voice of Chupadogra in 2010’s living Marmaduke.
Additionally, he rode his convincing reputation as a Western type to little-screen gigs upon Justified and The Ranch, as skillfully as a starring role in The Hero (2017), approximately an aging Western actor dealing subsequently a terminal complaint.
‘A Star Is Born’
In 2018, Elliott appeared in the eagerly anticipated remake of A Star Is Born, as the half-brother and governor of Bradley Cooper’s struggling country music singer. The doing impressed critics, resulting in an Academy Award nomination for the veteran actor.
The awards buzz helped lift the profile of choice Elliott project, The Man Who Killed Hitler and Bigfoot, scheduled for an American theatrical forgive in February 2019.
Elliott’s show may delve into the realm of fantasy, but that’s ultimately how Elliott sees the real animatronics of all actor. “We’on the serious pretenders, some not so earsplitting probably, but that’s what we get bond of,” Elliott said. “We accomplish for a bustling.”