With his kind, watchful eyes, rumpled face and personable manner, the actor Robert Forster, who has died aged 78 from brain cancer, was an unusual presence to find in a Quentin Tarantino film. But then Jackie Brown (1997), adapted from Elmore Leonard’s novel Rum Punch, is not like other Tarantino movies. Rather than revelling in the offhand comic violence that made the director famous, this is a humane and tentative love story between two seen-it-all veterans of the last-chance saloon: Jackie, a money-smuggling flight attendant played by Pam Grier, and the sanguine, by-the-book bailbondsman Max Cherry, in whom Forster shows the flame of hope still flickering.
When Max first sees Jackie, a subtle shift in Forster’s eyes signals that something inside this man, who has previously been impossible to sway or impress, has suddenly been reignited. That their connection is rooted in empathy and kinship long before it flowers into romance (they kiss just once in the film’s closing minutes) makes it that bit more profound.
Forster called it “the best job I ever had”. His performance was informed by his own proximity to Max’s circumstances: prior to being cast by Tarantino, he was no stranger to the last-chance saloon himself. He had enjoyed one spell of success three decades earlier when he made his screen debut as a disturbed and taciturn private caught up in the psychodrama between his superior (Marlon Brando) and that man’s promiscuous wife (Elizabeth Taylor) in John Huston’s Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967). Forster’s wiry, insolent good looks and coiled stillness would always have set him apart, but it did not hurt that he was shown riding a horse naked, bareback in both senses of the word, as Brando and Taylor looked on admiringly.
He followed this with several years of impressive work, most notably the western The Stalking Moon (1968), alongside Gregory Peck, and Haskell Wexler’s Medium Cool (1969), an expert blend of drama and documentary that included scenes shot amid the protests and rioting at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Forster played a cameraman who becomes politicised when his footage is used in the FBI’s crackdown on anti-war protesters.
His career nosedived soon after, and by the time Tarantino came calling (the pair had met initially when the actor auditioned unsuccessfully for Tarantino’s 1992 debut, Reservoir Dogs) it was in the doldrums. “I have four kids,” he later said. “I took any job I could get.” Jackie Brown rescued Forster from obscurity and brought him his only Oscar nomination. The director described casting him as “one of the best choices I’ve ever made in my life.”
The son of Grace (nee Montanerella) and Robert Foster, he was born and raised in Rochester, New York. His father trained elephants for circuses including Ringling Bros and Barnum and Bailey. His parents divorced when he was eight. The “r” was added to his surname later to distinguish himself from a namesake in Actors’ Equity.
He got a degree in psychology from the University of Rochester, where he had already decided in his sophomore year to become an actor. Following a beautiful young woman (who later became his first wife) into an audition, he had ended up being cast in the chorus. This derailed his previous plans to go on to study law. He spent time in New York City looking for theatre work, returning every few days to Rochester to earn enough money as a substitute teacher to fund another week or so in cheap digs in Manhattan.
Darryl F Zanuck saw him on Broadway in 1965 in Mrs Dally and was sufficiently impressed to put him under contract to 20th Century Fox. Soon after this, Forster told the New York Times in 1972, his mother killed herself by self-immolation when he received his draft notice to serve in Vietnam. He was eventually exempted from service, partly because of the psychological effects of her death.
He starred with Dirk Bogarde and Anouk Aimée in the ill-fated drama Justine (1969), which changed directors midway through production, then played an avant-garde film-maker in Cover Me Babe and a tormented priest in Pieces of Dreams (both 1970). Aside from the shoddy but charming The Black Hole (1979), a transparent attempt by Disney to cash in on the Star Wars craze, the rest of his pre-Tarantino years were dominated by exploitation fare.
Alligator (1980) was an enjoyable comic horror, and Forster directed himself (his only time behind the camera) as a detective in Hollywood Harry (1986). A role in the Chuck Norris action vehicle The Delta Force (also 1986) announced a marked downturn. “There was a long time when I only did positive characters,” he said. “Then somewhere in the middle of my career I was broke and I did a bad guy in The Delta Force. And I got stuck in bad guys for 13 years. I didn’t do a good guy again until Jackie Brown.”
His prospects picked up after his Oscar nomination. He was in the Jim Carrey slapstick comedy Me, Myself and Irene (2000) and The Descendants (2011) with George Clooney. Scheduling conflicts had prevented him from accepting a role in the original 1990 series of David Lynch’s innovative television whodunit Twin Peaks but he was cast in 1999 in the pilot episode of Lynch’s noir TV series, Mulholland Drive. When that was rejected by the network ABC, and reshaped with new footage into a film, the result, released in 2001, included Forster in only one scene. He featured more prominently in Lynch’s acclaimed third series of Twin Peaks (2017) as a sheriff who greets each outlandish turn of the plot with equanimity. Lynch called him “a great actor and a great human being”.
He was recently seen as a man whose wife is suffering from dementia in What They Had (2018), and in El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie (2019), a Netflix spin-off of the TV series Breaking Bad in which he had previously played “the Disappearer,” a vacuum cleaner salesman moonlighting as a supplier of new identities.
He is survived by his partner, Denise Grayson, as well as four children: a son, Robert Jr, from an early relationship, and three daughters, Elizabeth, Maeghen and Kate, from two marriages, both of which ended in divorce.
• Robert Forster (Robert Wallace Foster Jr), actor, born 13 July 1941; died 11 October 2019
