Bo Hopkins, actor best known for American Graffiti and The Wild Bunch – obituary

Bo Hopkins, the actor, who has died aged 84, specialised in outwardly cool, laidback characters but with a distinct undercurrent of menace.

He made his name as the unhinged Clarence “Crazy” Lee in the 1969 Sam Peckinpah movie The Wild Bunch, and established a cult following in George Lucas’s American Graffiti (1973) as Joe Young, the intimidating leader of the Pharaohs, a group of “greasers” cruising the streets of Modesto, looking for trouble in his ’51 Mercury.

Hopkins was also instantly recognisable to television viewers, his credits included such popular series as The Rockford Files (as Jim Rockford’s disbarred lawyer friend John Cooper), Charlie’s Angels, Murder She Wrote and The A-Team.

In Dynasty he had a recurring role as Matthew Blaisdel, the former lover of Krystle Carrington (Linda Evans), and husband of Claudia (Pamela Bellwood), who arranges to have him bumped off in an explosion after finding out about his affair with Cristal.

His real name was William Mauldin Hopkins and he was born on February 2 1938 in Greenville, South Carolina, and adopted aged nine months. He grew up, he claimed, in the era depicted in American Graffiti, telling an interviewer: “When I stop and look back at it now, we had the best music and the best cars, really. We had Elvis, The Beatles, the best singers. We had the best times. My mother never locked any doors.”

In fact American Graffiti was set in 1962 when Hopkins was in his mid-20s, and his early life was far from idyllic. When he was nine his adoptive father, a mill worker, died in front of him of a heart attack. His mother remarried but he did not get on with his stepfather and ran away from home several times. He was eventually taken in by his maternal grandparents.

He was 12 when he learnt that he had been adopted and met his birth mother and half-siblings.

He was often in trouble as a teenager, playing truant and becoming involved in petty crime. He dropped out of school just before his 17th birthday and enlisted in the US Army rather than be sent to reform school, subsequently serving in Korea with the 101st Airborne Division.

Back in the US, he began acting in local plays, won a scholarship to study at the Pioneer Playhouse in Kentucky, and made his way to New York. His southern drawl served him well and he appeared in small roles in off-Broadway productions, taking the name “Bo” from Bo Decker, the character he played in an off-Broadway production of Bus Stop.

He eventually made his way to Hollywood, where he trained at the Desilu-Cahuenga Studios and then at the Actors Studio. He then took small television roles before being cast in The Wild Bunch.

His film credits include Peckinpah’s 1972 classic The Getaway in which he played an associate of Steve McQueen’s bank robber who finds himself double-crossed by fellow henchman Al Lettieri. In the same director’s The Killer Elite he played a weapons expert and marksman, Jerome Miller, and in Alan Parker’s Oscar-winning Midnight Express he was the sinister Tex, in reality an agent for the US Drugs Enforcement Administration, who poses as a friend of Billy (Brad Davis) but ensures that he is sent to prison.

Other credits included The Bridge at Remagen and The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing.

In 2020 Hopkins appeared in his last film, Hillbilly Elegy, Ron Howard’s adaptation of the family memoir by J D Vance , in which he appeared alongside Glenn Close as Vance’s grandparents, Mamaw and Papaw.

Hopkins’s first marriage, to Norma Woodle, was dissolved. He is survived by his second wife Sian, née Green, by their daughter, and by a son from his first marriage.

Bo Hopkins, born February 2 1938, died May 28 2022