Wilford Brimley has died | Hacker News Reader

Wilford Brimley has died

nytimes.com

68 pointsuptown31 comments

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Here’s his last tweet from yesterday. https://twitter.com/realwilfordb/status/1289330498867793925?...

The infamous Liberty Medical commercials:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YXQaMaBxwRg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQy8_nYH-qM

Remix of Wilford's Liberty Medical commercial: https://youtu.be/2hNu1I9r_1A

Hearing his name more brings to mind for me the Quaker Oatmeal commercials he did in the '80s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOLXnkbfEuo

I realize he had bigger, more mainstream roles that he'll be remembered for. But the most iconic for me was, Blair, in The Thing.

He performs my favorite "crazed destruction" scene in that movie.

"Nobody gets in or out of here! NOBODY! You guys think I'm crazy?! Well, that's fine! Most of you don't know what's going on around here, but I'm damn well sure some of you do! You think that thing wanted to be an animal?! No dog's gonna make it a thousand miles to the coast! You don't understand! That thing wanted to be US! A cell gets out, and it'll imitate everything on the face of the Earth! AND NOTHING CAN STOP IT!"

Hmm, so he was also the brutal fixer in 'The Firm'. Any other dark roles, rather than his well known grandfather image?

Postmaster General role in Seinfeld, which parodied his role in Absence of Malice. The Seinfeld role was played for laughs but there was a little bit of a dark edge to it, in a funny way.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=On3cQ0sPvSY (appearance about 1:17 in)

He was perfectly cast, and perfectly played, his role as a nuclear power plant technician in The China Syndrome.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089901/

Sort of a dark role here as a "spy master"

Pour one out for Wilford. Plus we'll need a new Brimley Line. https://twitter.com/BrimleyLine

I love how he was only 49 in cocoon. Retired a living in a retirement community. At 49! Tom Cruise is older now.

Another example of an actor who routinely played much older characters is Clive Dunn, who most notably at age 48 played the elderly Lance Corporal Jones in the UK sitcom Dad's Army [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clive_Dunn

For a similar experience, watch Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point (1969). Philip Baker Hall was only thirty-seven when he acted in that film, but he already looks like the old man whom people would recognize from the more acclaimed roles he started getting in his fifties and sixties.

Also Abe Vigoda. Who is dead now.

That shows you how decrepit people were at that age back in the day.

I recalled immediately this interview with Ron Howard on the Director’s Cut podcast.

The segment starts around 20:30 to 34:00 with a discussion of directing stars Don Ameche, Wilford Brimley, Hume Cronyn, and Brian Dennehy in Cocoon (1985) and their different acting styles—particularly Don and Wilford.

God speed.

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-directors-cut-a-dg...

He was only 85? Wow. The dude looked 85 in the 90s.

He was in Cocoon playing someone 70-80ish in 1985.

Seriously. I think I was making the “diabeters” joke twenty years ago, and to think he was 65 then, wow!

He was 50 in Cocoon!

I know but, jeez. Wow.

"dia-beetus"

GFC....only 85? That puts him in his 50’s when he played an old person in Cacoon..... and he looked old AF.

You may find this Twitter account of interest

https://mobile.twitter.com/BrimleyLine

He was a lot younger than he looked. The article says he started out playing fathers of actors 25 years older than himself

It’s a huge mystery. People used to visibly age faster? My grandfather looked 40 in his 20s.

Best in Hard Target with Van Damme.

Amusingly I'm watching this right now. The whole movie is just awful, but in that wonderful awfulness of the mid 90s, where slow, repetitive pans of Van Damme's face seemed "cool". I just love it.

Directed by John Woo, with Jean Claude Van Damme doing his strange Cajun(?) accent, and Lance Henriksen looking like he just stepped off the set of Aliens.

JCVD is "The muscles from Brussels". He's Belgian.

Oh I know, but I think they were trying to get him to do some sort of Cajun accent for the movie and it just turned out really strangely, in a good way.

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