Bill McKinney
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| Bill McKinney | |
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| Born | September 12, 1931 Chattanooga, Tennessee |
Bill McKinney (born September 12, 1931) is an American character actor whose most famous role was the sadistic mountain man who abused and then sodomized Bobby Trippe (Ned Beatty) in the movie Deliverance.
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[edit] Biography
[edit] Early life
McKinney was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee. He had an unsettled life as a child, moving twelve times. Once when his family moved from Tennessee to Georgia, he was beaten by a gang and thrown into a creek. At the age of 19, he joined the Navy during the Korean War. He served two years on a mine sweeper in Korean waters, as well as being stationed at Port Hueneme in Ventura County, California. While on leave from this posting, he visited Los Angeles; during this time, he decided he wanted to be an actor. Upon his discharge in 1954, he settled in southern California, attending acting school at the famous Pasadena Playhouse in 1957. His classmates included Dustin Hoffman and Mako. During this time, McKinney supported himself by working as an arborist, trimming and taking down trees - he continued working in this field until the mid 70s, by which time he was appearing in major films.
[edit] Career
After Pasadena Playhouse he moved onto Lee Strasberg's Actors Studio, making his movie debut in exploitation pic She Freak (1967). He was also busy in television, making his debut in 1968 on The Monkees and attracting attention as Lobo in Alias Smith and Jones. It was Deliverance which provided his breakthrough in 1972, and is still his signature role. In his autobiography, Deliverance co-star Burt Reynolds said of McKinney "I thought he was a little bent. I used to get up at five in the morning and see him running nude through the golf course while the sprinklers watered the grass...". He went on to say that McKinney got so caught-up in the sodomy scene that he was ready to bugger Ned Beatty for real. "He always played sickos, but he played them well. With my dark sense of humour, I was kind of amused by him ... McKinney turned out to be a pretty good guy who just took the method way too far". McKinney told Maxim magazine that all Reynolds' stories were untrue. "If you lose control on a movie set", McKinney told Maxim, "it's not acting, it's indulgence".
He cemented his reputation for on-screen villainy in the 1970's with appearances in several films for leading directors, Sam Peckinpah's Junior Bonner, John Huston's The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean, Peter Yates's For Pete's Sake and most chillingly as the assassin in Alan J. Pakula's The Parallax View. However it was with Clint Eastwood that McKinney would become most strongly associated with, becoming part of Eastwood's stock company after they worked together in Michael Cimino's Thunderbolt and Lightfoot. He enjoyed one of this best roles through this association, starring as 'Capt. "Redlegs" Terrell' in The Outlaw Josey Wales under Eastwood's direction. He appeared in another six Eastwood films from The Gauntlet in 1977 to Pink Cadillac in 1989 when the Eastwood stock company disbanded.
Other memorable roles include a misanthrope who is done in by John Wayne's The Shootist in the eponymous film directed by Don Siegel Mckinney was one of the last men that John Wayne ever killed on screen, one of Stallone's nemeses in the initial Rambo film, First Blood (1982), Against All Odds (1984), Heart Like a Wheel (1983), Back to the Future Part III (1990), and The Green Mile (1999). As well as films, McKinney has appeared in the classic TV movie The Execution of Private Slovik (1974), while guest-starring on some of the top TV shows, including Starsky and Hutch, The A-Team, Murder She Wrote and Columbo.
McKinney took up singing in the late 1990s, eventually releasing an album of standards and country & western songs appropriately titled Love Songs from Antri, reflecting Don Job's pronunciation of the infamous town featured in Deliverance. He also played the heroic and noble Jonah Hex in an episode of Batman: The Animated Series called "Showdown". In that episode, he was the polar opposite of his character in Deliverance.
