JOE DON BAKER
(12 February 1936 - 7 May 2025)
Action could have been the middle name of the American actor Joe Don Baker because he looked the part of the essentially tough guy in movies. Instead, his real middle name ‘Don’ conjures up other images of a hard man, being the head of a family or the boss of some nefarious organisation. Sadly, Joe Don Baker has died from lung cancer at the age of 89. Physically, he was an imposing figure, six foot, two inches tall and who you couldn’t help but notice. Whenever he appeared in a scene you knew he was going to be trouble. He had a lively career playing heavies, including sheriffs, police detectives, a baseball player, military types and, of course, villains. He always looked the part but you also felt that beneath that tough exterior and its chubby face was a heart of gold – tarnished gold, perhaps – but nevertheless with a touch of sympathy about his devilry.
Joe Don Baker was born in Groesbeck, Texas, the son of Doyle Charles Baker and his wife Edna. When Joe’s mother died when he was twelve, he was brought up by his aunt Anna. From an early age he was into basketball and football and won a sports scholarship to North Texas State College. In 1958 he graduated with a BA in business administration. Following US Army service, he moved to New York and, like many other aspiring thespians, enrolled at the Actors Studio and eventually became a life member. He started out in stage work in New York but was soon taken up by television (from 1965) and by 1967 he broke into films with Cool Hand Luke, Stuart Rosenberg’s prison drama with Paul Newman. Baker was uncredited as the ‘Fixer’.
That led to Paul Wendkos’ Guns of the Magnificent Seven, Blake Edwards’s Wild Rovers and Sam Peckinpah’s Junior Bonner with Steve McQueen. In Phil Karlson’s Walking Tall (1972) he was top-billed as Sheriff Buford Pusser, a former wrestler who opens a logging business and when attacked by local thugs becomes a vigilante (wielding hickory clubs for protection). It became a cult movie, with two sequels, a TV film and a series (although Baker was not involved with the other versions). Next came Don Siegel’s crime drama Charley Varrick with Walter Matthau as the brains behind a bank robbery and with Baker the contract killer hired to get the cash back. The actor continued in similar vein in The Outfit with Robert Duvall, Phil Karlson’s Framed, Andrew V. McLaglen’s action picture Mitchell – with Baker as a police detective – and Final Justice, another actioner in which he played a Texan sheriff. He eventually played ‘The Whammer’, a legendary baseball player, in Barry Levinson’s The Natural alongside Robert Redford, Robert Duvall, Kim Basinger and Glenn Close.
Comedy arrived with the Chevy Chase vehicle Fletch, and then there were three James Bond films: The Living Daylights with Timothy Dalton and GoldenEye and Tomorrow Never Dies with Pierce Brosnan. In between times Baker had been in Martin Scorsese’s Cape Fear, Steven Soderbergh’s The Underneath, Charles Matthau’s The Grass Harp (from a novella by Truman Capote), co-starring Piper Laurie, in which he played another Sheriff. He was also in Tim Burton’s sci-fi epic Mars Attacks! His last film was Mud, a coming-of-age drama from Jeff Nichols in 2012. Matthew McConnaughey played Mud, the killer of the man who impregnated his girlfriend with Baker as King, the father of the dead man. Tye Sheridan, Sam Shepard, Michael Shannon and Reese Witherspoon were also on board.
Joe Don Baker also carried on in TV roles in The Streets of San Francisco, Edge of Darkness, In the Heat of the Night, Citizen Cohn, as Joe McCarthy, George Wallace, as Big Jim Folsom, and The Cleaner with Benjamin Bratt in 2009, his last TV appearance. Baker was married to Maria Dolores Rivero-Torres from 1969 until their divorce in 1980.
MICHAEL DARVELL