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Bill McKinney

Bill McKinney built a long screen career around a presence that could make even a supporting role feel dangerous. Born William Denison McKinney in Chattanooga, Tennessee, on September 12, 1931, he had an unsettled childhood that included 12 moves. At 19, he joined the Navy during the Korean War, serving for two years on a minesweeper in Korean waters before being stationed at Port Hueneme, California. After his discharge in 1954, McKinney remained in California and studied at the Pasadena Playhouse, where his classmates included Dustin Hoffman and Mako Iwamatsu. He later moved on to Lee Strasberg’s Actors Studio. Acting was not yet a full-time living, and he worked as an arborist until the mid-1970s. McKinney made his film debut in She Freak in 1967 and appeared on television the following year in The Monkees. His role as Lobo in Alias Smith and Jones brought further attention, but Deliverance gave him his breakthrough in 1972. As the backwoods mountain man who assaults Ned Beatty’s character, McKinney became central to one of the film’s most disturbing sequences. That intensity made him a natural fit for rugged dramas and westerns. His early films included Junior Bonner, The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean and The Parallax View. After working with Clint Eastwood in Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, McKinney became a recurring presence in Eastwood films, including The Outlaw Josey Wales, The Gauntlet, Every Which Way but Loose, Any Which Way You Can and Pink Cadillac. He also played Jay Cobb in John Wayne’s final film, The Shootist. Later appearances in First Blood, Back to the Future Part III and The Green Mile showed how readily McKinney could add menace or weathered authority to a film. His work also extended across television and voice acting, including Jonah Hex in Batman: The Animated Series. In the late 1990s, he took up singing and released Love Songs from Antri, an album of standards and country and western songs. McKinney died in 2011, leaving behind a body of work shaped by tough characters, western landscapes and a screen presence filmmakers repeatedly put to good use.