El Camino, Jackie Brown Star Robert Forster Passes Away

Film and television has lost another of its legends, as Robert Forster has passed away. TV Line reports that Forster, who earned an Academy Award nomination for his career-resurging role in Jackie Brown, died on Friday following a battle with brain cancer. Forster was 78 years old.

Forster was just back on screens with his appearance in El Camino: A Breaking Bad Film, where he reprised his Breaking Bad role of Ed the Disappearer. That film is now streaming on Netflix.

Forster was a star long before he had his brush with Oscar, breaking out with acclaimed work in 1967’s Reflections in a Golden Eye and 1968’s The Stalking Moon. He would continue that run with 1968’s Medium Cool, as well as starring roles in TV series in the early 1970s, Banyon and Nakia. However, his work soon faltered after that. 1979 saw his star in the lead role of Disney’s Black Hole, which was a box office disappoinment, and it would lead to a string of increasingly smaller films and shows including B-movies Alligator and Vigilante, a supporting role in Chuck Norris’ The Delta Force, and the like.

By the mid-1990s, Forster was appearing in low budget films like Maniac Cop 3: Badge of Silence, Body Chemistry 3: Point of Seduction, and Scanners: The Showdown. It was then that he was brought in by Quentin Tarantino to play the role of Max Cherry in Jackie Brown. That role revived his career, earning him the Oscar nod. He would go on to star in the likes of Mulholland Drive, Me, Myself & Irene, Lucky Number Slevin, and many other films. His TV roles included Ed on Breaking Bad, Arthur Petrelli in Heroes, Bud Baxter in Last Man Standing and Sheriff Frank Truman in the 2017 revival of Twin Peaks.

On behalf of 411, our condolences to the family, friends, and many fans of Mr. Forster. The film and TV world will certainly miss him.