Ward won a Golden Globe and the Venice Film Festival ensemble prize for his performance in Short Cuts in 1993, his biography said. That same year he appeared in the action movie Uncommon Valor with Gene Hackman and in the drama Silkwood with Meryl Streep. In 1983 he portrayed Mercury 7 astronaut Virgil "Gus" Grissom in the adaptation of Tom Wolfe's book, The Right Stuff. He played everything from an astronaut, cowboy, Vietnam war soldier, a chain-smoking police detective-turned-assassin, to a hero battling giant worms, the release said. I will always remember chatting about his love of Django Reinhardt and jazz guitar during our long hot days in the high desert. When it came to battling underground worms I couldn’t have asked for a better partner. "The unique thing about Fred Ward is that you never knew where he was going to pop up, so unpredictable were his career choices," the release said. But his breakthrough role came when he played opposite Clint Eastwood in the 1979 film Escape from Alcatraz. He made his first American film appearance playing a cowboy in the 1975 film, Hearts of the West. His career spanned more than four decades, starting with foreign films in the early 1970s and stretched through 2015 with his final role in the television series True Detective, according to his online IMBD page. Ward took a roundabout way into acting, after serving three years in the US Air Force in the 1960s and then working as an Alaskan lumberjack, a boxer where his nose was broken three times and a short-order cook, according to a biography provided by Hofmann. No cause or place of death was released, as per his family's wishes, publicist Ron Hofmann said. Ward is survived by his wife of 27 years, Marie-France Ward, and his son, Django Ward.Fred Ward was among the cast of 'The Right Stuff.' Photo: Supplied / AFP Ward most recently appeared in the second season of HBO’s True Detective as the retired cop father of Colin Farrell’s Detective Ray Velcoro. On the small screen, he had recurring roles on NBC’s ER playing the father of Maura Tierney’s Abby Lockhart in 2006-2007 and guest starred on such series as Grey’s Anatomy, Leverage and United States of Tara. He also reteamed with Altman for the part of a studio security chief in the director’s 1992 Hollywood satire The Player, and played a union activist and Meryl Streep’s workmate in Mike Nichols’ Silkwood in 1983. Ward played President Ronald Reagan in the 2009 Cold War espionage thriller Farewell and had a supporting role in the 2013 action flick 2 Guns, starring Denzel Washington and Mark Wahlberg. Ward’s other roles included a rumpled cop chasing a psychotic criminal played by Alec Baldwin in George Armitage’s Miami Blues. In the horror-comedy Tremors, Ward paired with Kevin Bacon to play a pair of repairmen who end up saving a hardscrabble Nevada desert community beset by giant underground snakes.īacon reacted to the news of Ward’s death by tweeting: “So sad to hear about Fred Ward.
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