Name | Jack Elam |
---|---|
Caption | Elam in Kansas City Confidential (1952) |
Birthname | William Scott Elam |
Birth date | |
Birth place | Miami, Arizona, United States |
Death date | October 20, 2003 |
Death place | Ashland, Oregon, United States |
Years active | 1944–95 |
Spouse | Margaret Jennison (1961-2003) (his death)Jean Elam (1937-61) (her death) |
William Scott "Jack" Elam (November 13, 1918 – October 20, 2003) was an American film actor best known for his numerous roles as villains in Western films.
He grew up picking cotton. He lost the sight in his left eye during a boyhood accident. He was a student of both Miami High School in Gila County and Phoenix Union High School in Maricopa County and graduated from the latter in the late 1930s.
He attended Santa Monica Junior College in California and subsequently became an accountant in Hollywood; one of his clients was movie mogul Samuel Goldwyn. At one time, he was the manager of the Bel Air Hotel in Los Angeles.
In 1963, he got a rare chance to play the good guy when he played the part of Deputy Marshal J.D. Smith in The Dakotas, a TV western that ran for only nineteen episodes. He played an eccentric sidekick to John Wayne in Howard Hawks's Rio Lobo (1970). Elam was given his first comedic role in Support Your Local Sheriff!, after which he found his villainous assignments dwindling and his comic roles increasing.
In 1985 Elam played as Charlie in The Aurora Encounter. During this film Elam made a lifelong relationship with a 11 year old boy named Mickey Hays, who suffered from progeria. As shown in the documentary I Am Not A Freak viewers see really how close Elam and Hays really were. Elam said, "You know I've met a lot of people, but I've never met anybody that got next to me like Mickey."
In 1994, Elam was inducted into the Hall of Great Western Performers of the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum.
Elam classified the stages of a moderately successful actor's life, as defined by the way a film director refers to the actor suggested for a part. (He said this on a George Plimpton ABC documentary about the making of Rio Lobo.) This humorous quote has also been attributed to other actors, especially Ricardo Montalban and Mary Astor:
Stage 1: "Who is Jack Elam?" Stage 2: "Get me Jack Elam." Stage 3: "I want a Jack Elam type." Stage 4: "I want a younger Jack Elam." Stage 5: "Who is Jack Elam?"
Elam died in Ashland, Oregon, of congestive heart failure. He was married twice, and had two daughters, Jeri Elam and Jacqueline Elam and a son, Scott Elam.
Category:1918 births Category:2003 deaths Category:Actors from Arizona Category:American film actors Category:Deaths from myocardial infarction Category:People from Ashland, Oregon Category:People from California Category:People from Gila County, Arizona Category:Spaghetti Western actors Category:Western (genre) film actors
This text is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA License. This text was originally published on Wikipedia and was developed by the Wikipedia community.
The World News (WN) Network, has created this privacy statement in order to demonstrate our firm commitment to user privacy. The following discloses our information gathering and dissemination practices for wn.com, as well as e-mail newsletters.
We do not collect personally identifiable information about you, except when you provide it to us. For example, if you submit an inquiry to us or sign up for our newsletter, you may be asked to provide certain information such as your contact details (name, e-mail address, mailing address, etc.).
When you submit your personally identifiable information through wn.com, you are giving your consent to the collection, use and disclosure of your personal information as set forth in this Privacy Policy. If you would prefer that we not collect any personally identifiable information from you, please do not provide us with any such information. We will not sell or rent your personally identifiable information to third parties without your consent, except as otherwise disclosed in this Privacy Policy.
Except as otherwise disclosed in this Privacy Policy, we will use the information you provide us only for the purpose of responding to your inquiry or in connection with the service for which you provided such information. We may forward your contact information and inquiry to our affiliates and other divisions of our company that we feel can best address your inquiry or provide you with the requested service. We may also use the information you provide in aggregate form for internal business purposes, such as generating statistics and developing marketing plans. We may share or transfer such non-personally identifiable information with or to our affiliates, licensees, agents and partners.
We may retain other companies and individuals to perform functions on our behalf. Such third parties may be provided with access to personally identifiable information needed to perform their functions, but may not use such information for any other purpose.
In addition, we may disclose any information, including personally identifiable information, we deem necessary, in our sole discretion, to comply with any applicable law, regulation, legal proceeding or governmental request.
We do not want you to receive unwanted e-mail from us. We try to make it easy to opt-out of any service you have asked to receive. If you sign-up to our e-mail newsletters we do not sell, exchange or give your e-mail address to a third party.
E-mail addresses are collected via the wn.com web site. Users have to physically opt-in to receive the wn.com newsletter and a verification e-mail is sent. wn.com is clearly and conspicuously named at the point of
collection.If you no longer wish to receive our newsletter and promotional communications, you may opt-out of receiving them by following the instructions included in each newsletter or communication or by e-mailing us at michaelw(at)wn.com
The security of your personal information is important to us. We follow generally accepted industry standards to protect the personal information submitted to us, both during registration and once we receive it. No method of transmission over the Internet, or method of electronic storage, is 100 percent secure, however. Therefore, though we strive to use commercially acceptable means to protect your personal information, we cannot guarantee its absolute security.
If we decide to change our e-mail practices, we will post those changes to this privacy statement, the homepage, and other places we think appropriate so that you are aware of what information we collect, how we use it, and under what circumstances, if any, we disclose it.
If we make material changes to our e-mail practices, we will notify you here, by e-mail, and by means of a notice on our home page.
The advertising banners and other forms of advertising appearing on this Web site are sometimes delivered to you, on our behalf, by a third party. In the course of serving advertisements to this site, the third party may place or recognize a unique cookie on your browser. For more information on cookies, you can visit www.cookiecentral.com.
As we continue to develop our business, we might sell certain aspects of our entities or assets. In such transactions, user information, including personally identifiable information, generally is one of the transferred business assets, and by submitting your personal information on Wn.com you agree that your data may be transferred to such parties in these circumstances.