Actor Robert Forster passed away Friday, October 11, having succumbed to brain cancer. He was 78 years old.
Forster wasn’t the first in his family to be involved in some form of the entertainment business, with his father, Robert Forster Sr, having worked as an elephant trainer for Ringling Brother and Barnum & Bailey Circus. However, he initially wasn’t intent on pursuing an entertainment-based career, originally prepared to study law. However, after starring in student performances of Bye Bye Birdie, he switched gears and decided to become an actor.
After appearing in supporting roles for only two movies - Reflections in a Golden Eye in 1967 and The Stalking Moon in 1968 - he quickly was able to nab a starring role by his third film, Medium Cool in 1969. Forster’s performance was critically acclaimed and the film was hailed as a masterpiece, later going on to be preserved in the National Film Registry as “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.”
Forster’s career through the 1970’s and 1980’s were a mix of lead and supporting roles. Most notably, he was in Disney’s The Black Hole in 1979 and the cult monster movie Alligator in 1980. Despite such a critically acclaimed lead role in Medium Cool, his filmography for the next two decades had varying degrees of success, though unfortunately never matching the amount of praise he received early on. In the 1990’s, he was originally set to play Sheriff Harry S. Truman in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks series, but had to drop out due to other commitments.
In 1997, after a string of hit-and-miss releases, Forster’s career got a much-needed revival when he was cast as Max Cherry in Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown. While the film is often the most overlooked of all Tarantino’s filmography in retrospect, it gave Forster the boost he needed at the time to make him a sought-after actor, the same way Tarantino did so for John Travolta in Pulp Fiction and Lawrence Tierney in Reservoir Dogs. Lead actress Pam Grier also received such a boost from the success of Jackie Brown.
From there, Forster’s roles became much more noteworthy through the rest of his career. While he never really had any noteworthy leading roles since Jackie Brown, he became a highly respected character actor. A year after, he had a small part in Gus Van Sant’s remake of Psycho, while in 2000, he took on a supporting role in the Farrelly Brothers’ Me, Myself, & Irene. In 2001, he had small supporting parts in both Michel Gondry’s debut Human Nature and David Lynch’s Mulholland Dr.
Forster’s film career remained steady into the 2010’s, with his most noteworthy role being a supporting part in Alexander Payne’s The Descendants. During this time, Forster also ventured out into television, with notable guest spots on Breaking Bad in 2013 and in Last Man Standing from 2012 to 2018. He also finally got to appear on Twin Peaks when Lynch revived the series in 2017. Forster appeared in a recurring role as Frank Truman, the brother of the character he was originally meant to play in the original series.
Forster’s final film appearance was in El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie, reprising his role from the television series. The film was released the same day he passed away, making for a memorable, poetic end to a five-decade career.
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