James Coburn

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James Harrison Coburn, Jr.^[1] (August 31, 1928 – November 18, 2002) was an Oscar-winning American actor.

[edit] Biography

[edit] Early life

Coburn was born in Laurel, Nebraska, the son of Mylet S. (née Johnson) and James Harrison Coburn, Sr., a garage mechanic. His maternal grandparents were immigrants from Sweden.^[1] He grew up in Compton, California and acted in college, eventually making his stage debut at the La Jolla Playhouse.^[2]

[edit] Career

Coburn appeared in dozens of television roles. He and Ralph Taeger costarred with Joi Lansing in Klondike on NBC in the 1960–1961 season. When Klondike, set in the Alaskan gold rush town of Skagway, was cancelled, Taeger and Coburn were regrouped as detectives in Mexico in NBC's equally short-lived Acapulco.

Coburn soon appeared the 1960s and 1970s in a variety of films, first primarily with his friends Steve McQueen, Robert Vaughn, and Charles Bronson in the cinema classics The Magnificent Seven and The Great Escape. A villainous Texan in the hugely successful Charade (1963), a glib Naval officer in The Americanization of Emily (1964) and a character role as a one-armed Indian tracker in Major Dundee (1965) gained him much notice.

In 1966, he became a bona-fide movie star with the release of Our Man Flint, a James Bond spoof released by 20th Century Fox. After a sequel, he decided to branch off into the independent film world. Due to his interests in martial arts (which he discovered by training with Bruce Lee), Buddhism, and gong-playing, the remainder of the decade (which included less-than-memorable films) proved relatively uneventful in his career.

In 1971, he starred in the western A Fistful of Dynamite, a.k.a. "Duck, You Sucker," directed by Sergio Leone, as an Irish explosives expert and revolutionary who has fled to Mexico during the time of the Mexican Revolution in the early 20th Century.

He teamed up with director Sam Peckinpah for the 1973 film Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid (they had worked together in 1965 on Major Dundee). An MGM producer tried to sabotage the production, causing the film to be drastically edited when it opened. Peckinpah and Coburn were greatly disappointed and turned next to Cross of Iron, a critically acclaimed war epic which performed poorly in the U.S. but was a huge hit in Europe. The two remained good friends until the legendary director's death in 1984. In a TV Guide interview in 1999, Coburn said he had used Peckinpah as the basis for his Oscar winning role of an abusive alcoholic in Affliction.

Due to severe rheumatoid arthritis, he was featured in very few films during the 1980s. He spent much of his time writing songs with British singer-songwriter Lynsey De Paul. He claimed to have healed himself with pills containing a sulfur-containing compound and returned to the screen in the 1990s, appearing in films such as Young Guns II (1990), Sister Act 2 (1993), Maverick (1994), The Nutty Professor (1996), and Payback (1999), mostly in minor but memorable roles. For his vivid portrayal of the abusive father of Nick Nolte in Affliction, he won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor in 1998.

[edit] Death

He died on November 18, 2002, aged 74, of a heart attack, while listening to the radio. He was survived by his wife, Paula Coburn (née Murad),^[3] who was at his side when he died, as well as a son, and a stepdaughter. At the time of his death, he was the voice for the "Like a Rock" Chevrolet television ad campaign. Actor James Garner succeeded Coburn for the remainder of the ad campaign.

Paula Murad had hosted a TV show in Washington D.C. before moving to California. She made a few movie and television appearances. She died of cancer on July 30, 2004.

[edit] Filmography

[edit] Films

[edit] Television

[edit] References

[edit] External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to:

James Coburn

• James Coburn at the Internet Movie Database
• James Coburn at Find A Grave