August 9: Happy Birthday Sam Elliott

[TMC]

https://lebeauleblog.com/2018/08/09/...d-robert-shaw/

Sam Elliott celebrates his 74th birthday today. Elliott worked in construction while studying acting at Cal State Los Angeles. He began working in television and film at the end of the sixties; one of his first roles was a bit part in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, which co-starred Katharine Ross, who many years later he married (they are still together). Elliott was a regular on one season of Mission: Impossible, and in the mid-seventies starred in a few low-profile features, like Lifeguard and the horror film Frogs. In the 1980s, he starred in a number of TV movies, many of the Westerns, such as Wild Times and The Quick and the Dead.

Elliott had prominent roles in 1980s features such as Mask and Road House. In 1993, he had two of his best roles to date, playing a pair of historical figures. He played Virgil Earp in Tombstone, and then was part of the enormous cast of the Civil War movie Gettysburg, as Union General John Buford.


From the early 1990s on, Elliott has been consistently busy. He was nominated for two Golden Globes and an Emmy for his 1990s TV work—fittingly, in TV movie Westerns, Conagher and Buffalo Girls (he later received another Emmy nomination, for voice work on Robot Chicken). Highlights of Elliott’s feature film work in the last 25 years have included playing The Stranger (the cowboy narrator character) in The Big Lebowski, another war hero, Sergeant Major Basil Plumley in We Were Soldiers, Gen. Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross in Ang Lee’s Hulk, and Lee Scoresby in The Golden Compass. Elliott has appeared in indie films like The Alibi and The Big Bang, and had memorable cameos in Jason Reitman’s Thank You for Smoking and Up in the Air.