Jack Elam
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Jack Elam (November 13, 1918—October 20, 2003) was an American film actor. He appeared mostly in westerns.
Elam attended Santa Monica Junior College in California and subsequently became an accountant in Hollywood and, at one time, manager of the Bel Air Hotel in Los Angeles. His face is memorable in part because of an out-of-kilter blind left eye. In interviews, Elam admitted that he got the slow eye after a fellow Boy Scout stabbed him in the left eye with a pencil during a scrape at a troop meeting. He appeared mostly in westerns and gangster films playing "heavies". In 1963 he got a rare chance to play the good guy when he played the part of Deputy Marshall J.D.Smith in "The Dakotas", a TV western which was to run for 19 episodes. Elam was given his first comedic role in Support Your Local Sheriff!, after which he found his villainous assignments dwindling and his comic jobs increasing. He was inducted into the Hall of Great Western Performers of the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum in 1994.
Elam died of heart failure on October 20, 2003.
Incomplete Filmography
- 1952 Kansas City Confidential
- 1952 High Noon with Gary Cooper, as drunken Charlie in jail
- 1954 Vera Cruz with Gary Cooper and Burt Lancaster, as Tex
- 1955 Kiss Me Deadly, as Charlie Max
- 1955 Wichita with Joel McCrea and Vera Miles, as Al Mann
- 1957 Night Passage
- 1961 The Comancheros
- 1966 The Rare Breed
- 1967 The Way West
- 1968 Once Upon a Time in the West
- 1968 Firecreek
- 1968 Support Your Local Sheriff! with James Garner, as unwillingly Deputy Jake
- 1970 Support Your Local Gunfighter! with James Garner, as Jug May
- 1970 Dirty Dingus Magee as John Wesley Hardin
- 1978 Hot Lead and Cold Feet, as Rattlesnake
- 1981 Cannonball Run, as Doctor Nikolas Van Helsing
External links
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