Veteran actor Fred Ward, who parlayed rugged everyman looks into a lengthy career playing everything from historic American heroes to a monster-fighting repairman, has died, his representative said Friday.
Ward was 79 when he passed away on Sunday. The cause of his death was not immediately revealed.
The San Diego native and Air Force veteran had stints as a short-order cook, boxer and Alaskan lumberjack before finding his true calling as an actor in the 1970s, Ward’s manager Ron Hoffman said in a statement.
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His first major role was in Clint Eastwood’s 1979 jailbreak classic “Escape from Alcatraz,” but Ward’s career took off thanks to his work in the 1983 space race epic “The Right Stuff,” bringing Tom Wolfe’s nonfiction best seller to the big screen.
Ward played Gus Grissom, one of the seven pioneering astronauts who launched America into the space age.
The versatile actor is perhaps equally well known for the 1990 science fiction comedy “Tremors,” where he and Kevin Bacon played down-on-their luck repairmen who stumble upon a flesh-eating worm monster. The cult classic would spawn a franchise that included six sequels and a television series.
But Ward was also no stranger to more daring art house fare, starring in 1990’s “Henry & June” as American novelist Henry Miller. Due to its racy sex scenes, the film was the first to be tagged with an NC-17 rating from the MPAA.
