Joe Don Baker, actor who wielded a big stick in ‘Walking Tall,’ dies at 89
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Joe Don Baker, the leading man turned character actor who broke out playing Sheriff Buford Pusser in the 1973 movie “Walking Tall,” has died, his family announced online.
The Texas-born tough guy died May 7 at age 89. No cause of death was given. Baker lived in Southern California when he died.
Joe Don Baker is one angry Texan.
“Joe Don was a beacon of kindness and generosity. ... Throughout his life, Joe Don touched many lives with his warmth and compassion, leaving an indelible mark on everyone fortunate enough to know him,” his family said.
Born on Feb. 12, 1936, in Groesbeck, Texas, Baker played football and basketball well enough to earn a sports scholarship to North Texas State College — now University of North Texas — where he earned a bachelor’s degree in business administration in 1958 and pledged to the Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity.
Baker went into the U.S. Army for two years and then emerged in New York, where he studied at the Actors Studio and performed onstage. His acting career took off in the mid-1960s when he moved to Los Angeles, where he started with TV roles in shows like “The High Chaparral” and “Mission: Impossible” before taking the spotlight as a leading man in movies like “Walking Tall” and “Final Justice.”
When he aged into character actor work, he played Claude Kersek in the 1991 Robert DeNiro remake of “Cape Fear,” Olaf Anderson in Eddie Murphy’s 1992 movie “The Distinguished Gentleman” and Tom Pierce in 1994’s “Reality Bites.” Baker played a villain in the 1987 James Bond movie “The Living Daylights,” featuring Timothy Dalton as Bond, and then CIA agent Jack Wade in two Bond films starring Pierce Brosnan: “GoldenEye” in 1995 and “Tomorrow Never Dies” in 1997.
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He also spent a lot of time working in TV, playing the title cop role in “Eischied” in 1979 — he often portrayed officers of the law — Big Jim Folsom in the 1997 miniseries “George Wallace” and myriad other roles in shows including “Ironside,” “The Streets of San Francisco,” “Gunsmoke” and “Mod Squad.”
As he moved around between TV and film, Baker was ahead of the curve in declaring Hollywood creativity dead.
“In Hollywood, they’ve chased away all the good writers,” he told The Times in 1986 when he was promoting the BBC-made miniseries “Edge of Darkness” and strongly favoring foreign work over domestic. “You never meet the writer when you’re making a TV movie in America — they’re too ashamed to show up and see how their work has been mangled by some committee.
“I hate the thought of showing up on another TV movie set in America ,” he continued. “All they care about here is whether you remember the words. In England they take the time to get everything right. I was there six months to make six hours. That’s a little more than twice as long as it would take in America.”
In the United States, Baker said, “By the time the networks get through worrying about who they’re gonna tick off, they wind up with nothing.”
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He said it was hard to get American studios interested in anything different. “They want huge budgets, which are easier to steal from. The studios don’t seem to mind losing hundreds of millions — they can write it all off. The rest of us can either pay to see their lousy movies or be taxed to cover their write-offs.”
But “Walking Tall,” the movie that made him, was based on the true story of a Tennessee sheriff whose life was turned tragic by criminals. During his six years in office, the real Pusser, known for carrying a big hickory stick he used as a weapon, fought a gang of bootleggers and con men who were operating along the Mississippi-Tennessee state line. He was shot and stabbed on several occasions and killed a thieving female motel owner who ambushed him. Then in 1967 he was waylaid in his car by criminals who shot him and killed his wife, Pauline. Pusser became a nationally known figure thanks to coverage on network news.
Even though the movie took the usual Hollywood liberties with Pusser’s life, the film played like a pure piece of American neo-realism: Audiences saw a strong family man who becomes politically involved only after being cheated at a local casino, beaten and left for dead. Elected sheriff, he becomes driven, fighting the local criminal syndicate, corrupt judges and state government officials. The film packed an emotional wallop.
It was not an instant success, however, when it was first released in urban theaters and sold as a good-old-boy Southern law-and-order drama.
‘Walking Tall’ is still about one man making a difference, minus the drawl.
“The initial ads had me coming out of a swamp with slime coming off me and I had this little stick in my hand,” Baker told The Times in 2004, when a significantly reimagined “Walking Tall” remake starring Dwayne Johnson was coming out. “They were just terrible ads.” But outsized success in Asian markets led to a new marketing campaign that turned the movie into an American hit.
“I very seldom get good parts offered me now,” he said in 2004. “I had better parts before I became a so-called star in ‘Walking Tall.’”
In a 2000 humor column, former Times columnist Chris Erskine lovingly called Baker “one of the best bad actors ever.”
Good parts or not, he won a Robert Altman Award at the Film Independent Spirit Awards in 2014 for his work in the 2012 Matthew McConaughey movie “Mud,” where he played the father of a murdered man. It would be his final work before he retired.
Baker was married for 11 years to Maria Dolores Rivero-Torres; the two had no children. A voracious reader and lover of cats and nature, the lifetime member of the Actors Studio “is mourned by a small but very close circle of friends who will miss him eternally,” his family said.
A funeral service will be held Tuesday morning at Utter McKinley Mortuary in Mission Hills.
Freelance writer Lewis Beale contributed to this report.
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