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Fred Ward, Star of ‘The Right Stuff,’ ‘Tremors,’ Dies at 79

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Carmel Dagan
·8 min read

Fred Ward, who starred in films including “Henry and June,” “Tremors,” “The Right Stuff” and “The Player,” died May 8, his publicist confirmed to Variety. He was 79.

Among his other prominent roles were parts in “Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins,” “Miami Blues” and “Short Cuts.”

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There was a certain retro quality to the actor’s persona that made Ward seem more akin to Humphrey Bogart or John Garfield (although not quite with those actors’ level of charisma) than to his contemporaries, and it did not seem at all affected. He appeared to be the sort of fellow who hailed from the South Side of Chicago or Hell’s Kitchen, but he was actually from San Diego.

Ward most recently appeared in the second season of HBO’s “True Detective” as Eddie Velcoro, the retired cop father of Colin Farrell’s Det. Ray Velcoro.

He recurred on NBC’s “ER” as the father of Maura Tierney’s Abby Lockhart in 2006-2007 and guested on series including “Grey’s Anatomy,” “Leverage” and “United States of Tara.”

The actor played President Reagan in the 2009 Cold War espionage thriller “Farewell,” directed by Christian Carion, and had a supporting role in the 2013 actioner “2 Guns,” starring Denzel Washington and Mark Wahlberg.

In Don Siegel’s “Escape From Alcatraz” (1979), Ward and Jack Thibeau played convict brothers who are partnered with Clint Eastwood’s Frank Morris in engineering the clever, daring purported escape from the Rock. (The bodies of the three men were never found, so it is unclear whether they truly escaped or whether they simply drowned in San Francisco Bay.) The film was vastly more interested in the mechanics of the escape than in developing the three prisoners as characters.

Ward brought his trademark grit to his portrayal of the courageous, intelligent astronaut Gus Grissom in 1983’s “The Right Stuff,” Philip Kaufman’s epic story of the early space program. Perhaps because Grissom ultimately lost his life in service to NASA (he was command pilot on Apollo 1, but before its launch on Feb. 21, 1967, the command module interior caught fire and all three men aboard died), audiences were especially sensitive to the portrayal in “The Right Stuff.” The film chronicled the Project Mercury spacecraft incident in which the emergency explosive bolts fired after splashdown and blew the hatch off, causing the ship to flood. A NASA investigation cleared Grissom of blame in the incident, but the way it was portrayed in “The Right Stuff” suggested that Ward’s Grissom had panicked and fired the explosive bolts as a result.

In Ron Underwood’s horror-comedy “Tremors,” one of several films that boosted Ward’s career and came out in 1990, Ward and Kevin Bacon showed enormous chemistry as a pair of handy men who end up saving a hardscrabble Nevada desert community when the town is beset by giant underground snakes, not unlike the sandworms of “Dune.” Co-star Bacon shared a memory of Ward online writing, “When it came to battling underground worms I couldn’t have asked for a better partner. I will always remember chatting about his love of Django Reinhardt and jazz guitar during our long hot days in the high desert. Rest in Peace Fred.”

“Tremors” made only $16 million, but it engendered enormous affection on the part of moviegoers on cable and home video and spawned six sequels and a TV series. The Washington Post said: “As the handymen, Bacon and Ward make a good team. Ward, who didn’t quite cut it as superhero Remo Williams, has the rugged looks and good humor of a friendly desperado, while Bacon continues to move beyond his glamour-boy roots and prove himself as an actor.”

In the quirky but painfully violent Alec Baldwin vehicle “Miami Blues,” Ward played Sgt. Hoke Moseley, the cop who’s after Baldwin’s sociopathic Fred Frenger. Roger Ebert wrote: “The actors struggle manfully with their roles. Baldwin, who is good at playing intelligence, is not so good here at playing an ex-con with a screw loose. Ward does a better job with the police sergeant; in movies like this and the underrated ‘UFO,’ he sits back and takes everything in and plays the cynic who will really bother you only if you really bother him.”

Later in the year came “Henry & June,” a movie that afforded Ward the opportunity to stretch as an actor in ways he simply hadn’t before. In the film, directed by Ward’s “The Right Stuff” helmer Philip Kaufman and based on the book by Anais Nin, the actor played renegade novelist Henry Miller, who pushed the envelope in his writings of what was acceptable in exploring sexuality. The film depicted the intellectual and psychosexual dynamics between Miller, his wife June (played by Uma Thurman) and the erotically engaged French novelist Nin in Paris in the early 1930s.

Variety declared: “The central performances of Fred Ward, as the cynical, life-loving Miller, and Maria de Medeiros, as the beautiful, insatiable Anais, splendidly fulfill the director’s vision.”

Critics and moviegoers ended 1990 with the sense that Ward was an engaging actor with more range than previously suspected.

Next he starred as Det. Harry Philip Lovecraft in the intriguing HBO movie “Cast a Deadly Spell,” set in a noirish 1940s Los Angeles in which supernatural abilities are pervasive. David Warner and Julianne Moore also starred in the film, which the Chicago Tribune called “wildly successful,” declaring that “screenwriter Joseph Dougherty has concocted a menacingly charming environment.”