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Scott Wilson, an actor whose subtle portrayals of crooks, criminals, and murderers with soft voices have garnered rave reviews in such films as "In the Heat of the Night" and "In Cold Blood," and who went from star type to veteran veterinarian in the zombie tube "The Walking Dead", died October 6 at his home in Los Angeles. He was 76 years old.
The cause was complications of leukemia, said a representative, Dominic Mancini.
During a career of more than half a century in Hollywood, Mr. Wilson was best known for playing the villain and rogues, often with a Southern accent that he had tapped into. his childhood in a small town in Georgia.
He shot down the main character of Robert Redford in the adaptation of "The Great Gatsby" in 1974; played a neighbor who hates dogs and kills squirrels in the family movie "Shiloh" (1997) and his two sequels; and received a Golden Globe nomination as captain Billy Cutshaw, a former psychologically disturbed astronaut, in "The Ninth Configuration" (1980), written and directed by the director of "Exorcist", William Peter Blatty.
But Mr Wilson stated that he often had trouble finding an original and interesting work as an actor and that he was fighting against studio executives who were classifying him in roles similar to those of Dick Hickock, the ruffled young assassin that he described in "In Cold Blood". As a commercial painter, he sometimes spent years without playing. In 1996, film critic Glenn Lovell described him as "one of the most respected but least used character actors in Hollywood."
His reputation was largely based on his first two films, a series of 1967 police dramas that took him out of the job of valet and clerk of the nationally known oil company. Mr. Wilson incarnated the murder suspect Harvey Oberst in "In the Heat of the Night" by director Norman Jewison, after a John Ball novel about a black Philadelphia police officer (Sidney Poitier) who was investigating a murder committed in Mississippi. The film has won five Oscars, including the Oscar for Best Picture.
Mr. Wilson in 2012. (Paul A. Hebert / Invision via AP)
Four months after its publication, Mr. Wilson appeared as One of the two masterpieces of "In Cold Blood", based on the novelist Truman Capote's story about a quadruple murder in a rural area of Kansas. The murders – committed by Hickock and Perry Smith – caused a sensation after being reported by Capote, whose "documentary novel" detailed the preparations for the crimes, the arrests of the killers and their execution in 1965.
The film was written and directed by Richard Brooks ("Elmer Gantry", "Cat on a Burning Roof"), who cast the roles of Mr. Wilson and his on-screen partner, Robert Blake, in great part because of their resemblance to Hickock Smith. In order to give the film a documentary feel, Brooks shot in black and white and on the spot, filming the scenes of murder in the farmhouse where Herbert Clutter and his family were stolen and murdered. Seven of the original jurors of the case participated in the film's trial scenes.
"Since 'In Cold Blood' is a precise and sensitive record of real events, it is irresistibly successful," wrote film critic Roger Ebert. Mr. Wilson and Blake, he added, "are so good that they go beyond performance and almost in life."
"All actors in the English-speaking world wanted both roles, including [Paul] Newman and [Steve] McQueen, "Wilson told Lovell. "Brooks hired two" strangers "and he wanted it to stay that way, we were treated like two killers he had met in one way or another." When the interpreters appeared to Capote's sides on the cover of Life magazine, they were described only as "actors playing killers", without giving their name.
Mr. Wilson experienced a resurgence at the end of his career with "The Walking Dead" on AMC, where he played alongside farmer and veterinarian Hershel Greene from 2011 to 2014. His character lost a leg in the third season before losing the head during the fourth season. But shortly before the announcement of Wilson's death on Saturday, a "Walking Dead" sign at Comic Con in New York confirmed his presence in the ninth season of the series. According to Variety, Mr. Wilson had already filmed his scenes.
William Delano Wilson was born in Atlanta on March 29, 1942. His father was a building contractor. He died at the age of 12. He urged his mother to move the family to her home town of Thomasville, near the Florida border.
Mr. Wilson graduated from high school in 1960 and received a basketball scholarship from Southern Polytechnic State University in Chamblee, Georgia, where he studied architecture before landing, to hitchhike in California and enroll in theater classes.
He spent several years playing in local theater productions before earning an audition for "In the Heat of the Night" with the help of a friend's stepfather, a casting director. For "In Cold Blood," he acknowledged that Poitier and composer Quincy Jones, who had scored "Heat of the Night," had helped him attract Brooks' attention.
Wilson's early work also included the 1969 films "Castle Keep" and "The Gypsy Moths," starring Burt Lancaster, as well as "The New Centurions," a crime drama directed by Richard Fleischer. He was the test pilot Scott Crossfield in "The Right Stuff" (1983), inspired by Tom Wolfe's book on the space program, and – in a rare leading role – appeared as a soldier shaken by the war in "One year of the Quiet Sun "(1984).
The latter was directed by Polish filmmaker Krzysztof Zanussi, with whom Mr. Wilson met for "Our God's Brother" (1997), in the role of Saint Albert Chmielowski. He recalled being congratulated by Pope John Paul II, who had written the play on which the film was based, for having "penetrated deeply into the character".
It seems that Mr. Wilson came out of a professional crisis with his prison chaplain job in "Dead Man Walking" (1995). In recent years, he has been credited with films including "Pearl Harbor" (2001) and "Monster". (2003). He also played the role of father of actress Marg Helgenberger in the television series "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation".
He married Heavenly Koh, a lawyer, artist and his only immediate survivor, in 1977.
At the first performance of Mr. Wilson on the show, "The Walking Dead" was one of the highest-rated programs on cable television. But he did not know at first if he wanted to do this bloody series of zombie killings – until one of his closest advisors reads the script and tells him: "That's really well, you must do it. "
The council, he told film reporter David Poland in 2012, came from his mother, who was 97 years old.
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