They don't make actors like Warren Oates any more. Indeed, it was only during the 1970s, a period when American cinema pushed the artistic envelope further than it has before or since, that a dumpy, balding good ol' boy with a wonky grin like Oates could become the unlikely movie star that he was.
"Warren Oates was narrow in range," writes the critic David Thompson, "until you got into those narrows, and then you felt depths of humour, ferocity, foolishness and honour."
In more than 50 feature films and hundreds of TV appearances, this proud Kentuckian could be mean as they come (In The Heat Of The Night's corrupt redneck cop), or play it surprisingly tender (in Peter Fonda's alt-western The Hired Hand); either way, he usually made a movie worthy of your attentions.
It was in four films with director Sam Peckinpah - Ride The High Country (1962), Major Dundee (1965), The Wild Bunch (1969) and the genuinely insane Bring Me The Head Of Alfredo Garcia (1974) - that Oates came into his own, graduating from frequent second banana to the director's cinematic alter ego. As Alfredo Garcia's dim anti-hero, an opportunistic piano player out of his depth in a Mexico best described as hell on earth, the actor offered a startling spot-on Peckinpah impersonation, right down to Bloody Sam's physical and verbal tics. As favoured by the cream of the American new wave, among them Terrence Malick (he was Sissy Spacek's father in Badlands), Steven Spielberg (1941), Monte Hellman (Two-Lane Blacktop) and John Milius (Dillinger), Oates brought a rough-hewn realism to the most generic of roles.
The real Warren Oates, however? A hard-working, hard-living, small-town boy and ex-marine with a burning dream - to make it big in the movies. Toiling away unnoticed for a decade-and-some as a B-player on most TV westerns, he slowly clawed his way towards the limelight. To the end, he remained resolutely modest about his achievements.
"I feel uncomfortable in Western roles," he said, "because my image of the Western man is John Wayne - and I'm just a little shit. The man has to be larger than life, bigger than the screen - and that sure ain't me."
He died in 1982, at the age of 53 (of a massive heart attack, attributed to years of quiet excess), having just scored one of the biggest box-office successes of his career as the gruff but loveable Sergeant Hulka, in Stripes.
Prolific to the end, he already had three further pictures in the can. Having gone to pains during his lifetime to avoid the cult of personality, Oates's posthumous reputation has soared.
Derek O'Connor