Bill Thurman, a character actor born on November 4, 1920, in Texas, was a large, rugged, and stocky individual with a hard, lined, and puffy face, a deep, twangy, and amicable voice, a strong, bulky build, and a charmingly low-key and down-to-earth unaffected natural screen presence.
Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Thurman frequently portrayed police officers and assorted scruffy redneck types in a huge number of entertainingly cheap'n'cheesy Southern-fried fright flicks and delightfully down'n'dirty drive-in fare. He acted in features for legendary Grade Z low-budget independent filmmaker Larry Buchanan, including "The Eye Creatures," "High Yellow," "Zontar the Thing from Venus," "Mars Needs Women," "Curse of the Swamp Creature," "In the Year 2889," "It's Alive!," and "A Bullet for Pretty Boy."
Thurman also had bit parts in two Steven Spielberg films: he played a hillbilly hunter in "The Sugarland Express" and an air traffic controller in "Close Encounters of the Third Kind." His other memorable roles include the abusive Coach Popper in Peter Bogdanovich's magnificent "The Last Picture Show," a doomed hitchhiker in "Keep My Grave Open," a corrupt sheriff in the Claudia Jennings exploitation classic "'Gatorbait," a mean small town deputy in "Ride in a Pink Car," a more amiable sheriff in the fantastic Bigfoot winner "Creature from Black Lake," Cheryl "Rainbeaux" Smith's father in "Slumber Party '57," a priest in "The Evictors," and the boozy, dissolute Reverend Bill McWiley in the enjoyably crummy "Mountaintop Motel Massacre."
Tragically, Bill Thurman passed away in Dallas, Texas, on April 13, 1995.
