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Clu Gulager

Clu Gulager built a screen career that could move comfortably between television Westerns, hard-edged crime stories, horror comedy and the occasional small role that felt like a nod to movie history. Born in Holdenville, Oklahoma, on November 16, 1928, he was an enrolled citizen of the Cherokee Nation. After serving in the United States Marine Corps and graduating from Baylor University, he studied in Paris under French actor and director Jean-Louis Barrault. Western television gave Gulager some of his most substantial early work. He played Billy the Kid opposite Barry Sullivan’s Pat Garrett in The Tall Man from 1960 to 1962, then portrayed Deputy Sheriff Emmett Ryker on The Virginian from 1964 to 1968. He also appeared in series including Have Gun – Will Travel, Wagon Train, Bonanza and Alfred Hitchcock Presents. These roles made good use of a presence that could register as approachable, watchful or dangerous without much warning. That edge was especially valuable in crime pictures. In The Killers (1964), Gulager teamed with Lee Marvin as a pair of ruthless hit men, sharing the film with Ronald Reagan, John Cassavetes and Angie Dickinson. He later appeared in Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show and played an FBI agent in John Landis’s darkly comic Into the Night. For horror fans, Gulager may be most immediately recognizable as Burt Wilson in Dan O’Bannon’s The Return of the Living Dead (1985), where his grounded performance helped hold together the film’s mix of panic, gore and comedy. He returned to genre territory as a shotgun-carrying bartender in Feast and its two sequels, all directed by his son, John Gulager, and also appeared in Piranha 3DD. His later work included the independent film Tangerine. Gulager’s final screen performance came in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, where he appeared as a bookstore owner in 2019—a brief closing role in a career that had stretched from television’s classic Western era into modern independent and genre filmmaking.