JACK ELAM

An all-time favorite actor who always wore the black hat, Jack Elam died last Monday at his home in Ashland, OR, of heart failure. He was 82. The San Francisco Chronicle had this story:

With a face once described as belonging on a wanted poster, Mr. Elam portrayed some of the screen's meanest, nastiest characters.

He tried to knife [James] Stewart in the back in "The Man From Laramie," and he bashed Stuart Whitman with a rifle butt in "The Comancheros." But one of his most memorable villainous turns was as the sex-crazed killer in Henry Hathaway's "Rawhide," the 1951 movie that established him as a screen tough guy.

"I was pretty bad in that one," he acknowledged in a 1993 interview with the Modesto Bee. "I shot a baby to make it dance, and I killed everybody in the picture except Tyrone Power and Susan Hayward. That's bad."

[ . . . ]

Elam's portrayals of sinister thugs, gangsters and gunslingers were aided immeasurably by his squinty, wandering left eye. He had lost vision in the eye at age 12 when a fellow Boy Scout jabbed him with a pencil during a scuffle at a troop meeting.

Mr. Elam had no control over his wandering eye. "It does whatever the hell it wants," he said in one interview.

The memorable opening sequence of Italian director Sergio Leone's 1968 western "Once Upon a Time in the West" is dominated by a close-up of Mr. Elam's eye as it stares sideways while a fly buzzes around it.

[ . . . ]

Mr. Elam appeared in about 100 feature films, including "Vera Cruz," "Kiss Me Deadly," "Gunfight at the O.K. Corral," "Rio Lobo," "Support Your Local Gunfighter" and "The Cockeyed Cowboys of Calico County."

He appeared in dozens of TV series, including "Cheyenne," "Bonanza" and "Gunsmoke," on which he had 14 guest roles.

He is survived by his wife, Jenny; three children, Jeri, Scott and Jacqueline; three grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.

Rest in Peace.