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Joe Don Baker, actor who wielded a big stick in 'Walking Tall,' dies at 89
Joe Don Baker, the actor best known for playing Sheriff Buford Pusser in the 1973 movie 'Walking Tall,' dies at 89. His career spanned nearly 50 years.
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Joe Don Baker, the leading man turned character actor who broke out playing Sheriff Buford Pusser in the 1973 movie âWalking Tall,â has died, his family announced online.
The Texas-born tough guy died May 7 at age 89. No cause of death was given. Baker lived in Southern California when he died.
Joe Don Baker is one angry Texan.
âJoe Don was a beacon of kindness and generosity. ... Throughout his life, Joe Don touched many lives with his warmth and compassion, leaving an indelible mark on everyone fortunate enough to know him,â his family said.
Born on Feb. 12, 1936, in Groesbeck, Texas, Baker played football and basketball well enough to earn a sports scholarship to North Texas State College â now University of North Texas â where he earned a bachelorâs degree in business administration in 1958 and pledged to the Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity.
Baker went into the U.S. Army for two years and then emerged in New York, where he studied at the Actors Studio and performed onstage. His acting career took off in the mid-1960s when he moved to Los Angeles, where he started with TV roles in shows like âThe High Chaparralâ and âMission: Impossibleâ before taking the spotlight as a leading man in movies like âWalking Tallâ and âFinal Justice.â
When he aged into character actor work, he played Claude Kersek in the 1991 Robert DeNiro remake of âCape Fear,â Olaf Anderson in Eddie Murphyâs 1992 movie âThe Distinguished Gentlemanâ and Tom Pierce in 1994âs âReality Bites.â Baker played a villain in the 1987 James Bond movie âThe Living Daylights,â featuring Timothy Dalton as Bond, and then CIA agent Jack Wade in two Bond films starring Pierce Brosnan: âGoldenEyeâ in 1995 and âTomorrow Never Diesâ in 1997.
He also spent a lot of time working in TV, playing the title cop role in âEischiedâ in 1979 â he often portrayed officers of the law â Big Jim Folsom in the 1997 miniseries âGeorge Wallaceâ and myriad other roles in shows including âIronside,â âThe Streets of San Francisco,â âGunsmokeâ and âMod Squad.â
Joe Don Baker wielded a big stick in âWalking Tall,â the 1973 movie based on the life of Tennessee Sheriff Buford Pusser.
(Los Angeles Times)
As he moved around between TV and film, Baker was ahead of the curve in declaring Hollywood creativity dead.
âIn Hollywood, theyâve chased away all the good writers,â he told The Times in 1986 when he was promoting the BBC-made miniseries âEdge of Darknessâ and strongly favoring foreign work over domestic. âYou never meet the writer when youâre making a TV movie in America â theyâre too ashamed to show up and see how their work has been mangled by some committee.
âI hate the thought of showing up on another TV movie set in America ,â he continued. âAll they care about here is whether you remember the words. In England they take the time to get everything right. I was there six months to make six hours. Thatâs a little more than twice as long as it would take in America.â
In the United States, Baker said, âBy the time the networks get through worrying about who theyâre gonna tick off, they wind up with nothing.â
He said it was hard to get American studios interested in anything different. âThey want huge budgets, which are easier to steal from. The studios donât seem to mind losing hundreds of millions â they can write it all off. The rest of us can either pay to see their lousy movies or be taxed to cover their write-offs.â
But âWalking Tall,â the movie that made him, was based on the true story of a Tennessee sheriff whose life was turned tragic by criminals. During his six years in office, the real Pusser, known for carrying a big hickory stick he used as a weapon, fought a gang of bootleggers and con men who were operating along the Mississippi-Tennessee state line. He was shot and stabbed on several occasions and killed a thieving female motel owner who ambushed him. Then in 1967 he was waylaid in his car by criminals who shot him and killed his wife, Pauline. Pusser became a nationally known figure thanks to coverage on network news.
Even though the movie took the usual Hollywood liberties with Pusserâs life, the film played like a pure piece of American neo-realism: Audiences saw a strong family man who becomes politically involved only after being cheated at a local casino, beaten and left for dead. Elected sheriff, he becomes driven, fighting the local criminal syndicate, corrupt judges and state government officials. The film packed an emotional wallop.
It was not an instant success, however, when it was first released in urban theaters and sold as a good-old-boy Southern law-and-order drama.
âWalking Tallâ is still about one man making a difference, minus the drawl.
âThe initial ads had me coming out of a swamp with slime coming off me and I had this little stick in my hand,â Baker told The Times in 2004, when a significantly reimagined âWalking Tallâ remake starring Dwayne Johnson was coming out. âThey were just terrible ads.â But outsized success in Asian markets led to a new marketing campaign that turned the movie into an American hit.
âI very seldom get good parts offered me now,â he said in 2004. âI had better parts before I became a so-called star in âWalking Tall.ââ
In a 2000 humor column, former Times columnist Chris Erskine lovingly called Baker âone of the best bad actors ever.â
Good parts or not, he won a Robert Altman Award at the Film Independent Spirit Awards in 2014 for his work in the 2012 Matthew McConaughey movie âMud,â where he played the father of a murdered man. It would be his final work before he retired.
Baker was married for 11 years to Maria Dolores Rivero-Torres; the two had no children. A voracious reader and lover of cats and nature, the lifetime member of the Actors Studio âis mourned by a small but very close circle of friends who will miss him eternally,â his family said.
A funeral service will be held Tuesday morning at Utter McKinley Mortuary in Mission Hills.
Freelance writer Lewis Beale contributed to this report.
