Joe Don Baker, the actor who as the real-life Sheriff Buford Pusser in the 1973 vigilante film Walking Tall carried a big stick to mete out his own Tennessee brand of justice, died May 7, his family has announced. He was 89.
A cause of death was not disclosed.
Born February 12, 1936, in Groesbeck, Texas, Baker played football for North Texas State College and, upon graduating in 1959, served a two-year stint in the Army and then moved to New York City to study acting at the Actor’s Studio. He would remain a lifelong member of the famed organization.
After some time performing on the New York stage – he appeared on Broadway in 1963’s Marathon ’33 and, a year later, in Blues For Mister Charlie. He then moved to Los Angeles and launched a TV and film career that included guest appearances on such series as Honey West, Gunsmoke, The Big Valley, Mission: Impossible, Lancer and The Streets of San Francisco, among many others. Early film roles included small part in Cool Hand Luke and The Valachi Papers.
Walking Tall poster art, 1973
Getty
His signature role came in 1973, when he took up a four-foot-long hickory club as the weapon of choice for Walking Tall‘s justice-seeking sheriff. Critics may have scoffed, but the movie, directed by Phil Karlson, was a hit with audiences caught up in the early ’70s vigilante film craze that included Death Wish, Dirty Harry and even Taxi Driver.
Standing at 6’2″ and with the broad frame of the linebacker he was in college, Baker had a prolific screen career playing tough guys on both sides of the law throughout the 1970s and ’80s in such movies as Charley Varrick (1973), Mitchell (1975) and Speedtrap (1977). Comedy roles increasingly made their way to Baker in the 1980s and 1990s, including another police chief role in the 1985 Chevy Chase comedy Fletch and, in 1996, Tim Burton’s Mars Attacks!
Other memorable roles included a baseball player known as The Whammer opposite Robert Redford in The Natural (1984) and, in 1991, a corrupt investigator in Martin Scorsese’s Cape Fear.
Baker also appeared in three James Bond films of the 1980s and ’90s: The Living Daylights (1987) opposite Timothy Dalton as Bond, and in two Pierce Brosnan Bond movies GoldenEye (1995) and Tomorrow Never Dies (1997).
After appearing in nearly 60 movies throughout his career, Baker retired in 2012. His marriage in 1969 to Maria Dolores Rivero-Torres ended with divorce in 1980. Baker is survived by extended family in Groesbeck, Texas. A funeral service to honor his life will be held Tuesday in Mission Hills, California.
