Character Actor in Westerns Was 89

Matt Clark, the familiar character actor who like sagebrush found his way into Westerns including Paul Newman’s The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean, John Wayne’s The Cowboys and Clint Eastwood’s The Outlaw Josey Wales, has died. He was 89.

Clark died Sunday in Austin, Texas, his daughter, producer Amiee Clark, told The Hollywood Reporter. He broke his back a few months ago, she said.

Clark also acted alongside Robert Redford in Sydney Pollack’s Jeremiah Johnson (1972) and Brubaker (1980) — in the latter, he portrayed Purcell, the former warden’s clerk, in one of his best known roles — and opposite Eastwood in Don Siegel’s The Beguiled (1971), The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976) and Honkytonk Man (1982).

And he did four films for director Stuart Rosenberg: Pocket Money (1972), The Laughing Policeman (1973), Brubaker and Let’s Get Harry (1986).

As a director himself, Clark helmed the 1988 feature Da (1988), starring Bernard Hughes, Martin Sheen and his onetime acting teacher, William Hickey. The film is about a New York playwright summoned to Ireland to bury his father.

Clark’s work in Westerns also included Will Penny (1967), Monte Walsh (1970), Macho Callahan (1970), The Culpepper Cattle Co. (1972), The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid (1972), Sam Peckinpaugh’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973), Howard Zieff’s Hearts of the West (1975), Kid Vengeance (1976), The Legend of the Lone Ranger (1981) and A Million Ways to Die in the West (2014).

“I just loved ’em!” Clark said in a 1991 interview. “Just like you always wanted to do as a little kid, you put on chaps and boots and tie on spurs that jingle when you walk.”

Clark was born in Washington on Nov. 25, 1936, and raised in Arlington, Virginia. His father, Frederick, built boats and cabinets, and his mother, Theresa, owned a private school.

He spent two years in the U.S. Army and studied business administration at George Washington University but left to pursue acting. In New York, he studied at the HB Studio with Herbert Berghof and Hickey and understudied for Sheen in the original 1964-66 Broadway production of The Subject Was Roses.

Clark made his big-screen debut in Black Like Me (1964), starring James Whitmore, and played a Southern punk in the Oscar best picture winner In the Heat of the Night (1967), directed by Norman Jewison.

The dependable Clark also appeared in The Bridge at Remagen (1969), Robert Aldrich’s The Grissom Gang (1971), White Lightning (1973), Emperor of the North (1973), Outlaw Blues (1977), Walter Hill’s The Driver (1978), Some Kind of Hero (1982), Country (1984), The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension (1984), Return to Oz (1985), Back to the Future Part III (1990) and 42 (2013).

For television, he played the guy named Walt Bacon who works at Foxworthy Heating & Air on the first season of the ABC sitcom The Jeff Foxworthy Show, recurred on Grace Under Fire and appeared on Ben Casey, Dog and Cat, The Waltons, Magnum, P.I., The Practice, Chicago Hope and in the famed miniseries The Winds of War and Barbarians at the Gate.

In addition to his daughter, survivors include his third wife, Sharon, whom he married in 2000; his children, Matthias Clark (a musician), Jason Clark (a producer on the Peacock series Ted) and Seth Clark (a film editor); nine grandchildren; and one great-grandchild.