Joe Don Baker, the tall, broad-shouldered character actor who found overnight fame when he starred as a crusading Southern sheriff in “Walking Tall,” a surprise hit both at the box office and with critics, and who went on to an impressive range of screen roles over the next four decades, died on May 7. He was 89.
The death was announced by his family on Tuesday. The announcement did not say where he died or cite a cause.
Released in the era of “Dirty Harry” and “Billy Jack,” “Walking Tall” (1973) is the story of a Tennessee man who moves back to his hometown and finds it hopelessly changed by illegal gambling, prostitution and careless moonshiners. The movie, as Dave Kehr described it almost 40 years later in The New York Times, is “a wild-eyed fantasy about an incorruptible leader who finds it necessary to subvert the law in order to save it.”
A low-budget production, directed by the journeyman filmmaker Phil Karlson, it opened on Staten Island months before it arrived in Manhattan but proved to be a phenomenon. Vincent Canby, reviewing the film in The Times, called it “relentlessly violent” but also “uncommonly well acted.”
It was soon noticed and praised by a wide array of prominent critics. Pauline Kael of The New Yorker called it “a volcano of a movie” and saw in Mr. Baker, a 37-year-old unknown with a decade of credits, mostly on television, “the mighty stature of a classic hero.”
“The picture’s crudeness and its crummy cinematography give it the illusion of honesty,” she wrote.
The character Mr. Baker played — Sheriff Buford Pusser, whose weapon of choice is an oversize, homemade baseball bat — was a real person. According to Variety, “Walking Tall,” which was made for about $500,000, earned more than $40 million worldwide.
Looking back in 2000, Vanity Fair saw the film’s star as its secret weapon, writing that “Walking Tall” had “a major asset in Joe Don Baker, whose sideburns and greasy, likable rockabilly grin suggest a larger doughnut version of Elvis Presley.”
Joe Don Baker was born on Feb. 12, 1936, in Groesbeck, Texas, a small town east of Waco. He was the only child of Doyle Charles Baker, who managed a gas station, and Edna (McDonald) Baker. After his mother’s death, in 1946, he was raised by an aunt.
Joe Don played football in high school and had no particular interest in acting. But in his senior year at North Texas State College (now the University of North Texas), he got a small part in a play. After graduating in 1958 and serving in the Army for two years, he headed for New York.
He studied at the Actors Studio and made his Broadway debut in 1963 in “Marathon ’33,” a play written by the actress June Havoc about Depression-era dance marathons. Both that and his next play, James Baldwin’s “Blues for Mister Charlie” (1964), were Actors Studio Theater productions.
Mr. Baker made his television debut in a 1965 episode of the detective series “Honey West,” as a truck driver in trouble with his employer. He had an uncredited part in the hit Paul Newman prison drama “Cool Hand Luke” (1967) before making his official movie debut in “Guns of the Magnificent Seven” (1969).
He was noticed in Sam Peckinpah’s “Junior Bonner” (1971), in which he played Steve McQueen’s cheerfully dishonest younger brother. The character, Andrew Sarris wrote in The Village Voice, is “a kind of Disneyland desperado, out to swindle all the senior citizens he can find.”
After “Walking Tall,” Mr. Baker made an equally impressive showing in the Don Siegel heist film “Charley Varrick” (1973). His character, a supremely confident Mafia hit man, is the kind who would shove a storekeeper in a wheelchair against a wall or literally kick a man when he’s down.
Mr. Baker was often the face of law enforcement: a drug-dealing police chief in the Chevy Chase comedy thriller “Fletch” (1985); another small-town Southern sheriff in “The Grass Harp” (1995); a private detective who knows how to play tough in Martin Scorsese’s “Cape Fear” (1991).
Mr. Baker was far from typecast, in film or on television. In “The Natural” (1984), starring Robert Redford, he was a 1920s baseball superstar meant to evoke Babe Ruth. He was the bellicose Senator Joe McCarthy in HBO’s “Citizen Cohn” (1992) and Big Jim Folsom, a colorful midcentury Alabama governor, in “George Wallace” (1997).
He played a brutally sadistic ex-con in a leisure suit in “Framed” (1975), Winona Ryder’s father in “Reality Bites” (1994), a rural Kansan ready to fight off space aliens with a shotgun in “Mars Attacks!” (1996), a heroine’s beer-guzzling father in “Joe Dirt” (2001) and a detective’s rich father-in-law in “Poodle Springs” (1998).
When he wasn’t offered great roles at home, Mr. Baker went abroad. In 1985, he appeared in “Edge of Darkness,” an award-winning six-part BBC mini-series about nuclear espionage. His performance as a colorful American C.I.A. agent with a flair for the dramatic earned him a nomination for a British Academy of Film and Television Arts award.
Mr. Baker appeared in three James Bond movies. He played a C.I.A. agent in “GoldenEye” (1995) and the same character in “Tomorrow Never Dies” (1997), both starring Pierce Brosnan. That was a step up morally from his first Bond role: an arms dealer and historical-battle fanatic, up against Timothy Dalton, in “The Living Daylights” (1987).
His last film role was a small part, as a vengeful father, in “Mud” (2012), a drama starring Matthew McConaughey.
His marriage to Maria Dolores Rivero-Torres ended in divorce in 1980 after 11 years. No immediate family members survive.
When asked how an inexperienced young man like him had been accepted into the prestigious Actors Studio, Mr. Baker was typically modest.
“I listened,” he said in a 1986 video interview. “I did a scene with a girl, and she did most of the talking, so I listened. Come to find out, that’s what you’re supposed to do when you act is listen.”
Ash Wu contributed reporting.
