While we all adore and root for the stars and starlets of tinseltown, there is a treasure-trove of good men and women who have been integral to the success of all our favorite films. Bona fide, hard working and talented people who may never star in a film or see their name on a poster hanging in the local cineplex but will never escape our minds and imaginations when it comes to some good iconic and funny roles they play. This column is a tribute to the “Oh, That Guy” types, the common actor and the B-listers. They are the…

Jack Elam

Age: 82 (died in 2003)

Number of Film & TV Roles: 206

Notable Roles: Once Upon a Time In the West; Support Your Local Sheriff!; Dirty Dingus Magee; Rio Lobo; The Cannonball Run; Cannonball Run II; The Aurora Encounter; Suburban Commando 

Typical Roles: Weird-looking cowpoke; weird-looking doctor.

Why He’s Great: Outside of maybe Marty Feldman, Jack Elam had the craziest eyes in Hollywood history. Put those eyes together with his imposing height and build, and overall rugged look, and he was the perfect recipe to play a shady character back in the ’50s and ’60s, which was usually a thuggish cowboy. I need proof, but I believe he was the reason the word “grizzled” was invented. When his youth faded, Jack and his eyes still found work as a lovable old goof. He was just great and one of a kind, and they don’t make them like Elam anymore.

Biography (via Wikipedia): Elam was born in Miami, Arizona, to Millard Elam and Alice Amelia Kirby. Kirby died in 1924, when young Jack was not quite four years old. By 1930, he was once again living with his father, older sister Mildred, and their stepmother, Flossie (Varney).

He grew up picking cotton. He lost the sight in his left eye during a boyhood accident when he was stabbed with a pencil at a Boy Scout meeting. 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.

Acting career
In 1949, Elam made his debut in She Shoulda Said No!, an exploitation film where a chorus girl’s marijuana smoking ruins her career and drives her brother to suicide. He appeared mostly in westerns and gangster films playing villains. In 1961, Elam played a slightly crazed character in an episode of The Twilight Zone, “Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?”.

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. Jack also was in the tv series Temple Houston playing George Taggart. In 1968, he played perhaps his shortest role in Once Upon a Time in the West where he played a gunslinger sent to kill Charles Bronson’s character. In that part, he spent a large part of the original scene playing with a fly he managed to catch in his gun barrel. 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 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 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 and writers, such as Harvey Miller, 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?”

Personal life and death
He was married twice (1, Jean Elam, from 1937 to her death in 1961; and 2, Margaret Jennison, from 1961 until his death in 2003), and had two daughters, Jeri Elam and Jacqueline Elam, and a son, Scott Elam. Elam died in Ashland, Oregon, of congestive heart failure.

Elam Clips: