Bo Hopkins obituary
04.06.2022 - 01:57
/ msn.com
The Wild Bunch (1969), his third film role, he played Crazy Lee, left behind by the gang with their hostages as they escape an ambush. His glee as he marches the terrified captives around at gunpoint singing We Shall Gather at the River highlighted the violent absurdity of the director Sam Peckinpah’s opening scene. In American Graffiti (1973), directed by George Lucas, he played the leader of a greaser gang, the Pharoahs, who frightens Richard Dreyfuss’s strait-laced Curt into pulling off a spectacular prank on the police.
His reward, Hopkins tells him with a wily grin, will be membership of the Pharoahs, complete with “car coat and blood initiation”. This combination of good ol’ boy affability and latent violence came to define Hopkins’s presence in more than 100 films and television roles, typecasting he escaped only occasionally, most notably perhaps in the soap Dynasty. His recurring part in this, as the geologist Matthew Blaisdel – former lover of Krystle Carrington (Linda Evans), and married to Claudia, who is having an affair with Blake Carrington’s son – was crucial enough for him to be brought back after being written out of the show.
His younger life may have prepared him for such roles. He was born in Greenville, South Carolina, named William, and adopted by Johnnie Hopkins, a mill worker, and his wife. But Johnnie died of a heart attack on the family’s front porch in front of Billy, then aged nine, and his mother, who dragged him inside trying to revive him.
He lived with his mother and maternal grandparents, but when his mother remarried, he rebelled against his stepfather and returned to his grandparents. Having learned of his adoption, he met his birth mother and half-siblings. A delinquent teenager, at
.