Wilford Brimley played old men long before he was one, gruff, slow and impossible to impress, and he could settle a scene with a sentence. The Thing (1982) gives him the best kind of part for that: a man who has done the sums.
Fi1m perspective
Blair sits at a computer in The Thing (1982) while the numbers come up, and Wilford Brimley does almost nothing with them. He does not shout and he does not weep. He reads the screen the way a man reads a bill he cannot pay, and it is the film's one scene of pure despair. It frightened us more than anything Carpenter puts in the corridors, because a monster is something we have never met and a tired man doing sums is not. That was Brimley's gift: he could make the quiet version of a feeling land harder than the loud one.
He came to acting late and from the side. After the Marines and years as a ranch hand, blacksmith and wrangler, he started in the late 1960s as a stuntman and extra in Westerns, and a run on The Waltons (1974–77) led to The China Syndrome (1979), where he played Ted Spindler, a plant worker. The next six years fixed him: Absence of Malice (1981), The Thing, Tender Mercies (1983), The Natural (1984) and Cocoon (1985), his first lead, as Benjamin Luckett, the man in charge of a group of retirees who get their youth back. He kept taking supporting parts into the 2000s and never stopped looking like the oldest man in the cast.
He usually was not. He was cast far older than his age for most of his career, and he helped it along, bleaching his hair for Cocoon so that a man of fifty could pass for a pensioner. The kit was small and he knew it: the moustache, the slow delivery, the refusal to be impressed. What he did with it was tell the truth to people who did not want to hear it. Harry in Tender Mercies says hard things to Robert Duvall, in one of five films they made together; Pop Fisher in The Natural is a weary manager who has seen too many seasons, opposite Robert Redford. When The Firm (1993) cast him against the grain as William Devasher, a security chief with none of the homespun comfort, the same stillness simply turned cold.
Nobody ever pretended he was a leading man, least of all Brimley, who once said: "I'm never the leading man. I never get the girl. And I never get to take my shirt off." He also claimed to know nothing about acting and to have been lucky to get hired. We do not believe him. Start with The Thing, where he is a scientist at the end of the world and behaves like one. Then try Cocoon, where he is fifty and playing a retiree, and see whether you check.
Biography
Wilford Brimley was an American actor. Born in Salt Lake City, Utah, he served in the US Marine Corps before working in various jobs including as a ranch hand, wrangler and blacksmith. He began his screen career in the late 1960s as an extra and stuntman in Western films.
Brimley became a character actor in the 1970s and 1980s. His film roles include Ted Spindler in The China Syndrome (1979), Blair in The Thing (1982), Pop Fisher in The Natural (1984) and Benjamin Luckett in Cocoon (1985). He also appeared in Cocoon: The Return (1988) and The Firm (1993).
Brimley was the longtime face of Quaker Oats television advertisements and promoted diabetes education through Liberty Medical commercials. He died in St George, Utah, in 2020.
