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remembers Richard Farnsworth 1920-2000 |
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He rode into Hollywood on a horse, but rode out on a lawnmower
By
RON MILLER
of TheColumnists.com
Richard Farnsworth always seemed a trifle amused by the fact
that some people considered him a movie star. He gave the impression
that his whole acting career was some kind of scam he ran on
Hollywood in between horse wrangling jobs.
But, fortunately, he left behind a filmed record of what he did in front of the cameras. And, make no mistake about it, Farnsworth had picked up a lot of knowledge about acting over the years--enough, in fact, to earn lots of rave reviews and two Oscar nominations.
Diagnosed with terminal cancer this year, Farnsworth wrote his own final scene and played it without a director's guidance. Last Friday, in the privacy of his New Mexico home, he took his own life with a gunshot. He was 80.
Farnsworth was one of my personal favorites--as an actor and as a man. I enjoyed him so much on screen that I would go out of my way to see anything he chose to do. He never disappointed me. He was at his best playing quiet men of great courage and sterling character, although I think perhaps his all-time best performance was as the charming old train robber Bill Miner in "The Grey Fox" (1983), a performance that earned him the Canadian equivalent of the Oscar.
I had never heard of Farnsworth until I saw him in "Comes A Horseman," the 1978 western in which he played his first major supporting role--an aging ranch hand, circa 1940, facing the end of his era as private range land was being taken over by huge ranch interests.
But once I sat down with Farnsworth to find out what he'd been doing in the first 60 years of his life, I learned I'd been watching him for years--and didn't even know it.
Looking for a way to pick up some easy money back in 1938, Farnsworth had signed on to be one of the multitude of horsemen in "The Adventures of Marco Palo," the big-budget Gary Cooper picture. He was just a horseman in those days, but he learned you could make pretty good money as a wrangler or stunt rider in westerns, which were plentiful back then.
When Farnsworth told me he also was one of the wranglers who roped the giant ape in the 1949 "Mighty Joe Young," I rushed right home, slapped the tape on my VCR and stop-framed the famous scene where Ben Johnson and his cowboys surround the big gorilla on an African plain and finally subdue him. I'm pretty sure I identified Farnsworth, who was a lanky guy with a distinctive way of sitting a horse.
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Over the years, I'd also seen Farnsworth do some pretty fancy riding, pretending he was somebody else. For instance, he was the stunt rider for Montgomery Clift in "Red River," doubled Guy Madison in his "Wild Bill Hickok" TV series and Steve McQueen in the "Wanted: Dead or Alive" series. He even persuaded us he was Jerry Lewis in "Pardners" (1956), the next-to-last film Lewis made with Dean Martin.
Farnsworth and Ben Johnson were good friends and had worked together for years as stunt riders in movies. Johnson got his first chance to play the male lead in a picture in "Mighty Joe Young" and he always encouraged Farnsworth to try acting on the grounds that, "If I can do it, so can you."
Though Johnson didn't last long as a leading man, he became one of Hollywood's most competent character actors and in 1971 won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for "The Last Picture Show." He made it look so easy that Farnsworth finally began to accept invitations to play bits here and there as an actor.
Director Alan Pakula had worked with Farnsworth on Robert Mulligan's "The Stalking Moon" (1969) and thought he could carry a much bigger part than other directors were giving him, so he cast Farnsworth in his "Comes A Horseman" in support of Jane Fonda. From the acclaim he earned for that role, Farnsworth never lacked for acting work again.
Though he was the main character in "The Grey Fox" and shared lead billing with Wilford Brimley in their short-lived 1992 TV series "The Boys of Twilight," Farnsworth mainly played supporting roles, some of them memorable. One of his most beloved roles was that of the adoptive father in TV's "Anne of Green Gables."
But last year director David Lynch gave Farnsworth his best role in a decade: The leading role in "The Straight Story," the whimsical true account of an elderly man's long trek to see his estranged brother, a cross-country journey that he makes riding his own power lawnmower because he no longer can drive a car. His performance was so natural, so emotionally touching that many picked it as the best of the year--and he earned an Oscar nomination in the leading actor category.
Though I only spent private time with Farnsworth once, I can assure you that the man I met was very much like the decent, soft-spoken men of character that he played so well on the screen. As a lifelong fan of westerns, I was able to ask him about lots of people he'd worked with over the years and he turned out to be a wonderful source of stories about his old western cronies.
Farnsworth preferred to do all his interviews in comfortable settings--and his favorite was the big riding stables and horsemen's club in Burbank. We dined at his usual table, which was right where all the riders would pass by. I can tell you that just about everybody knew and loved the guy because I had to share him with dozens of people that day, some of them well-known actors who liked to keep up their riding skills by hitting the trails every afternoon they weren't working.
It's painful to know that Farnsworth was in such low spirits last week that he decided to take his own life. Yet I can understand why he felt this was the right time to write his own finish. He would never get another role like the plucky, determined Mr. Straight. He probably wanted us to remember him that way and not the way his story otherwise was sure to end.
© 2000 by Ron Miller.
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