LOS ANGELES — Robert Forster, the handsome and omnipresent character actor who got a career resurgence and Oscar nomination for playing bail bondsman Max Cherry in “Jackie Brown,” died Friday. He was 78.
Publicist Kathie Berlin said Forster died of brain cancer following a brief illness. He was at home in Los Angeles, surrounded by family, including his four children and partner Denise Grayson.
Bryan Cranston called Forster a “lovely man and a consummate actor” in a tweet. The two met on the 1980 film “Alligator” and then worked together again on the television show “Breaking Bad” and its spinoff film, “El Camino,” which launched Friday on Netflix.
“I never forgot how kind and generous he was to a young kid just starting out in Hollywood,” Cranston wrote.
His “Jackie Brown” co-star Samuel L. Jackson tweeted that Forster was “truly a class act/Actor!!”
A native of Rochester, New York, Forster quite literally stumbled into acting when in college, intending to be a lawyer, he followed a fellow female student he was trying to talk to into an auditorium where “Bye Bye Birdie” auditions were being held. He would be cast in that show, that fellow student would become his wife with whom he had three daughters and it would start him on a new trajectory as an actor.
He worked consistently throughout the 1970s and 1980s in mostly forgettable B-movies — ultimately appearing in over 100 films, many out of necessity.
It was Quentin Tarantino’s 1997 film “Jackie Brown” that put him back on the map. After “Jackie Brown,” he worked consistently and at a decidedly higher level than during the “slump,” appearing in films like “Mulholland Drive,” “Me, Myself and Irene,” “The Descendants,” “Olympus Has Fallen,” and “What They Had.”
Forster is survived by his four children, four grandchildren and Grayson, his partner of 16 years.
