Powers Boothe obituary

The actor Powers Boothe, who has died aged 68, was one of Hollywood’s greatest villains. His characters embraced their villainy with complete self-belief, relished their freedom from restraint, and disdained the boredom of creatures more tightly bound by morality. They were also entertaining and dangerously likable.

Boothe’s bad men often represented the darker side of the heroes to whom he played foil; his flamboyant Curly Bill Brocius is the antithesis of Kurt Russell’s tightly wrapped Wyatt Earp in Tombstone (1993) and, as if they were two sides of the same violent person, his white-suited drug lord even shares a woman with Nick Nolte as the vengeful Texas ranger who was his childhood friend, in Walter Hill’s over-the-top B movie Extreme Prejudice (1987).

Later he moved to more nuanced but equally charismatic villains: Senator Roark, the corrupt politician who controls Basin City while trying to protect his child-rapist son, in Sin City (2005) and its sequel; or more recently on television as the brothel owner Cy Tolliver in Deadwood, battling Ian McShane’s less sophisticated Al Swearengen; as the millionaire father of Connie Britton’s country singer in Nashville, or as Gideon Malick in Agents of SHIELD, a role he first played in The Avengers in 2012.

It was not macho evil that drew Boothe to acting. He was born in Snyder, Texas, to Merrill Vestal Boothe and his, wife Emily (nee Reeves). His father was a rancher who grew cotton and named his son after his best friend, killed in the second world war. Boothe was drawn to acting while still in high school, where he gave up American football, he said, when he realised its referees might not always be unbiased or accurate.

After gaining his BA at Southwest Texas State University, in 1972 he took a master’s in acting at Southern Methodist University and landed a job in repertory with the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. He followed with more Shakespeare in Philadelphia and New Haven before making it to New York in a Lincoln Center production of Richard III. His movie debut came in The Goodbye Girl (1977) as a cast member of a production of that same play. The next year he had a small but memorable role in Cruising, explaining gay men’s use of handkerchiefs to signal availability in the bars Al Pacino, as an undercover cop, is investigating. But Boothe’s big break was in 1979, starring on Broadway in James McLure’s comedy about Texas machismo, Lone Star.

In 1980 he played Jim Jones, the cult leader who engineered the mass suicide of more than 900 of his followers, in a TV miniseries, The Guyana Tragedy, for which he won an Emmy award. The awards were presented during a strike by the Screen Actors Guild, whose picket Boothe crossed. Up against Jason Robards, Henry Fonda and Tony Curtis he had not expected to win, but he described it as “either the bravest moment of my career or the dumbest”.

His working life did not seem to suffer, and for a few years he played heroes, Hardin in Southern Comfort (1981), Mike Walker in A Breed Apart (1984), Andy in John Milius’s reactionary patriotic Red Dawn (1984), and Bill Markham in The Emerald Forest (1985). He also starred on television in HBO’s Philip Marlowe (1983-86), in which his portrayal of Raymond Chandler’s detective was partly in the wise-cracking style of Dick Powell but more a take on Humphrey Bogart’s Sam Spade.

Boothe’s success as a villain may have owed something to his training. “For the first 10 years I acted, all I did was Shakespeare, and the show I did in New York that brought me out to Hollywood was a flat-out comedy,” he said. “But they never let me do comedy.” Instead, he inserted off-the-wall humour into his darkest characters. This is never more evident than in Extreme Prejudice, which began as a Milius script; that film placed him firmly on the movies’ dark side. Yet he was subtle and restrained in another miniseries, Family of Spies (1990), as the traitorous naval officer John Walker, and played the heroic General Cuikov in a Russian co-production of Stalingrad (1990).

Boothe enjoyed being the bad guy: “villains last longer in people’s minds, and they’re more fun to play,” he said. His favourite performance was as Frost, an obsessive and sneaky corporate villain in the low-budget science fiction flick Mutant Species (1994), but his most subtle villain may have been General Alexander Haig, the White House chief of staff in Oliver Stone’s Nixon (1995). Two years later he played a corrupt sheriff in Stone’s U-Turn, and in 2001 was excellent in Bill Paxton’s Frailty (2001), in which his FBI agent is on the other side, as it were, of Jim Jones-style villainy.

In the past decade he was busy with television, playing Vice-President Noah Daniels in 24, Kevin Costner’s lawyer brother in Hatfields & McCoys, and the Confederate general AS Johnson in To Appomattox.

Boothe raised horses on his ranch outside Los Angeles. In 1969 he married his college sweetheart, Pamela Cole, and she survives him, along with their daughter, Parisse, and son, Preston.

Powers Allen Boothe, actor, born 1 June 1948; died 14 May 2017