Frederic Forrest: Film and Television Actor (1936–2023)

Frederic Fenimore Forrest, Jr., actor, was born in Waxahachie, Texas, on December 23, 1936, and was the son of Frederic Fenimore Forrest, Sr., and Virginia (McSpadden) Forrest. The couple had one other child, a daughter named Virgina Ann “Ginger” Forrest. Forrest was the grandson of “[William] Bird Forrest, the Waxahachie Florist,” as he was billed in newspaper advertisements. His enormous (60,000 square feet) greenhouse was the largest in North Texas. After his death, the business was taken over by his sons, Frederic Forrest, Sr., and William Bird Forrest, Jr.

Education and Early Acting Career

At Waxahachie High School, Forrest ran track and played football, golf, and baseball. A fan of Western films, he made numerous visits to the three movie theaters in Waxahachie during his youth. He was voted Most Handsome in his senior year (1955), which was certainly an asset given his show business aspirations. As with many aspiring actors in the mid-1950s, he was heavily influenced by James Dean and Marlon Brando. Eventually, he appeared in three films with the latter.

Forrest served a six-month term in the U.S. Army. After his discharge he enrolled at Texas Christian University (TCU) and graduated in 1960 with a major in radio and television studies and a minor in theater arts. He moved to New York, where he studied with three esteemed drama teachers—Irene Dailey, Lee Strasberg, and Sanford Meisner. While doing so, he supported himself by working as a page at NBC Studios in the Rockefeller Center.

In 1966 Forrest garnered his first stage credit for Viet Rock, an anti-war off-Broadway musical which also resulted in his first movie credit after a live performance was recorded. He performed at the off-off-Broadway La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, where he appeared in the avant-garde play Futz!, directed by Tom O’Horgan. O’Horgan also directed the 1969 film adaptation of the play in which Forrest also performed. He got his first taste of television in 1967 with an uncredited appearance in Dark Shadows (1966–71), a Gothic soap opera, followed in 1968 and 1969 by two episodes in N.Y.P.D. (1967–69), a prime-time series that was filmed in New York. In 1968 he appeared in The Filthy Five for exploitation filmmaker Andy Milligan. For this effort he used the stage name of Matt Garth, the name of Montgomery Clift’s character in Red River (1948).

Hollywood Breakthrough

In 1970 Forrest made his way to Hollywood with Silhouettes, another off-Broadway play that had a run in Los Angeles. When the play folded, he decided to remain in California. He attended classes at the Actors Studio West before attracting attention with his first Hollywood film, When the Legends Die (1972), a coming-of-age tale in which he played a young Ute who joins the rodeo circuit under the tutelage of a veteran played by Richard Widmark. Although he was thirty-five years old, Forrest received a Golden Globe nomination for Most Promising Newcomer.

In 1974 Forrest had two memorable roles. One was the title role in Larry, a made-for-TV movie based on the true story of a man of average intelligence, wrongly found to be mentally deficient and placed in a mental hospital, who had to learn to cope with the outside world after twenty-six years of confinement. The other role was a relatively small part in The Conversation, but it introduced him to director Francis Ford Coppola, who would cast him in more prominent roles in several subsequent movies.

In 1976 Forrest appeared in a supporting role in The Missouri Breaks, a big-budget Western and his first film with Marlon Brando (Jack Nicholson also starred). The talent behind the camera was also first-rate and included director Arthur Penn, screenwriters Thomas McGuane and Robert Towne, and composer John Williams. Though the film was highly publicized (it was Brando’s first film in four years), it was not a hit with critics or the public.

In 1978 Forrest appeared in Ruby and Oswald, a television movie about the 1963 Kennedy assassination, in which he played Lee Harvey Oswald (Michael Lerner played Jack Ruby), even though, at age forty-one, he was seventeen years older than Oswald in 1963. Filming took place on location in Dallas. Homicide detective Jim Leavelle, who was handcuffed to Oswald when he was shot by Ruby, played himself in the film.

Apocalypse Now, The Rose, and Critical Recognition

Francis Ford Coppola cast Forrest in Apocalypse Now (1979) as Jay “Chef” Hicks, an aspiring saucier and a crewman on a Cambodia-bound patrol boat during the Vietnam war. While the film brought Forrest to the attention of a large moviegoing audience (the film grossed more than $78 million and ranked sixth in the domestic box office for 1979), the production of the film in the Philippines was a harrowing experience. Filming began in 1976 and dragged on for more than a year. The production schedule was abandoned early thanks to a typhoon, physically and mentally ill cast members, and other hurdles. According to Forrest, “Because we were creating a surreal, dreamlike war, nightmare personal things began happening. Sometimes we would think we were losing our minds. I became almost catatonic in the Philippines. I could think of no reason to do anything.” This was the second film in which Forrest appeared with Marlon Brando.

Another 1979 release that advanced Forrest’s career was The Rose, starring Bette Midler in a fictional tale loosely based on the life of Janis Joplin. Forrest played Huston Dyer, Midler’s chauffeur and lover, “a solid Texas oak unbroken by Miss Midler’s frenzies,” according to Aljean Harmetz, Hollywood correspondent for the New York Times. Thanks to his work in The Rose, Forrest received Best Supporting Actor nominations from the Oscars and Golden Globes. The National Society of Film Critics gave him its award for Best Supporting Actor of 1979 for The Rose as well as Apocalypse Now.

Later Career and Personal Life

Francis Ford Coppola next cast Forrest to star in One for the Heart (1982), a big-budget musical in which the characters never break into song. Instead, recording artists Tom Waits and Crystal Gayle sang songs that commented on the narrative, which involved a young Las Vegas couple (Forrest and Teri Garr) reexamining their marriage. Despite an enormous ($26 million) budget, largely devoted to re-creating Las Vegas in a studio, the film was a flop ($636,796 domestic gross), forcing the bankruptcy of Coppola’s Zoetrope Studios.

The debacle of One from the Heart notwithstanding, Forrest’s services were still in demand. He continued to work steadily in films and television. In 1982 he played hard-boiled fiction writer Dashiell Hammett in Hammett (a role he essayed a second time a decade later in Citizen Cohn, a 1992 television movie). He played another famous writer, Erskine Caldwell, in Double Exposure: The Story of Margaret Bourke-White, a 1989 made-for-TV movie. He received praise for his starring roles in the television miniseries Quo Vadis? (1985) and Die Kinder (1990). In 1988 he had a supporting role in Tucker: The Man and His Dream, a biopic of Preston Tucker, the famed automotive designer. It was Forrest’s final appearance in a Francis Ford Coppola film. A year later he appeared in a Texas-themed project when he played Blue Duck, a Cherokee outlaw, in Lonesome Dove (1989), the popular television mini-series based on the Larry McMurtry novel.

In 1993 Forrest joined the ranks of TCU’s Distinguished Alumni. Four years later he appeared in The Brave (1997), starring Johnny Depp, who also directed. Forrest’s third film with Marlon Brando, it was never released theatrically in the United States. Forrest continued to work steadily in films and television shows through the 1990s and into the early 2000s. His final role was in 2006 as the father of Willie Stark (played by Sean Penn), the Huey Long-like protagonist of All the King’s Men, in an adaptation of Robert Penn Warren’s novel.

Forrest was thrice married and thrice divorced. His wives were Nancy Ann Whitaker (1960–63), whom he met while at TCU; actress Marilu Henner (1980–83), who co-starred with him in Hammett; and British model Nina Dean, whom he married and divorced in 1985. None of the marriages resulted in any children. Forrest died at his home in Santa Monica, California, on June 23, 2023, after a long illness. After cremation his remains were buried with his parents in the Waxahachie City Cemetery.