Many of Clint Eastwood's hit films of the 1970s and 80s were made with a stock company of distinctive supporting actors. This kooky troupe included the elfin Sondra Locke, the wild-eyed Geoffrey Lewis and the effortlessly villainous Bill McKinney, who has died of cancer aged 80. Switching between westerns, comedies and thrillers, McKinney was seldom called upon for more than a few minutes of screen time but had the seasoned character actor's knack of making a memorable first impression. In Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (1974), the first of his seven films with Eastwood, he appears as a gibbering driver with a caged raccoon by his side and a boot full of white rabbits.
He was subsequently cast as the bloodthirsty Terrill, who oversees the massacre of Eastwood's family in The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976); as an oily, sex-crazed constable coolly ridiculed by Locke in The Gauntlet (1977); as a biker in a horned helmet, almost outclowning Clyde the orangutan in Every Which Way But Loose (1978) and its sequel, Any Which Way You Can (1980); as a one-handed circus performer whose shotgun act has misfired, in Bronco Billy (1980); and as a seen-it-all-before barman in Pink Cadillac (1989).
These thumbnail sketches were usually variations on a theme: southern good ole boys gone bad, men with moonshine on their breath and malevolence in mind. McKinney was mostly used as a comic foil for the perennial straight man Eastwood. But as zany as some of his performances were, there was often an undercurrent of genuine menace, especially for viewers who had seen him in John Boorman's Deliverance (1972).
Besides its duelling banjos soundtrack, Deliverance remains most famous for a queasily protracted scene in which McKinney (credited as Mountain Man) and Herbert "Cowboy" Coward (Toothless Man) set upon a couple of city slickers (played by Ned Beatty and Jon Voight) who have taken a wrong turn on a canoeing trip in the deep south. The wild-eyed, rotten-toothed Mountain Man brandishes a knife, taunts Beatty's character, forces him to undress and then rapes him, demanding that he "squeal like a pig" – perhaps one of the best-known lines in 70s cinema.
Boorman later told the journalist Roger Clarke that Stanley Kubrick found this episode particularly terrifying and wanted McKinney for the role of the ruthless drill sergeant in Full Metal Jacket (1987). McKinney accepted, but the director eventually backed out: "Kubrick couldn't bear to face him – he was just too afraid."
McKinney said that when the scene was filmed, he had drawn upon his memories of being bullied as a child after his family moved from Tennessee – he was born in Chattanooga – to Georgia. He dropped out of school and joined the US navy, serving on a minesweeper during the Korean war. He trained as an actor at the Pasadena Playhouse in California and broke into TV and films in the late 60s, working on and off as a tree surgeon to help pay the bills.
He made westerns with the directors Sam Peckinpah (Junior Bonner, 1972) and John Huston (The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean, 1972) and appeared as the smiling Parallax Assassin at Seattle's Space Needle in the dazzling opening sequence of Alan J Pakula's The Parallax View (1974). He also stood out as a gunman in Don Siegel's The Shootist (1976), firing at John Wayne, who has spied him in a saloon mirror, at the climax of Wayne's final film.
After appearing with Sylvester Stallone in First Blood (1982), McKinney expanded his repertoire of heavies, creeps and small-town sheriffs with regular TV engagements throughout the 80s and 90s. He was still called upon for mainstream movies, including Back to the Future Part III (1990) and The Green Mile (1999). In 2003 Maxim magazine named McKinney and his Deliverance co-star Coward the greatest movie villains of all time, and the pair later reunited for a western, Ghost Town: The Movie (2007).
In 2000 he released a country-tinged album, Love Songs from Antri, its title a reference to Aintry, the men's destination in Deliverance. The 2004 film Undertow – another tale of violence and survival in the deep south, with McKinney cast this time as a saviour figure – used one of his tunes, entitled Pistols of Gold. In an interview in 1976 with William R Horner, published in Horner's book Bad at the Bijou, McKinney had explained his hopes for a singing career that would eventually balance out all of those villainous roles: "If you can show people that you have some kind of sensitivity … then people will say, 'Jesus Christ, man, the cat can sing a song! He's got feelings!'"
McKinney was married several times and is survived by his son, Clinton.