David Huddleston, who has died aged 85, was a busy character actor who played the mayor in Mel Brooks’s spoof Western Blazing Saddles (1974) and the title character in the Coen brothers’ Raymond Chandler pastiche The Big Lebowski (1998).
Huddleston specialised in big, burly, bluff, blustery characters who tended to make up in sheer volume for what they lacked in grey matter.
As Mayor Olson Johnson in Blazing Saddles, Mel Brooks’s comedy about a black sheriff (Cleavon Little) who teams with a washed-up gunfighter (Gene Wilder) to save a town of racists and bigots from evil politicians and businessmen, Huddleston gets up at a town meeting after a grizzled old timer makes an incomprehensible speech about “Sidewindin’ bushwackin’ hornswagglin’ cracker croakers” and the like, to address the assembled citizens of Rock Ridge. “Now who can argue with that?” he says, pointing out that the speech was delivered in “authentic frontier gibberish”.
“It was probably the most fun I ever had on a set,” Huddleston recalled.
In The Big Lebowski, he was the wheelchair-bound, hippie-hating millionaire for whom Jeff Bridges, as Jeff Lebowski, a laidback hippie known as “The Dude”, is mistaken by a gang of thugs. In a typical Coen brothers comic muddle, the Big Lebowski gets the Dude to act as a go-between with villains who have apparently “kidnapped” his trophy wife, Bunny (Tara Reid), in a plot which includes a gang of nihilists, a severed toe, pornographic films, a sadistic bowling rival and countless other diversions.
The Big Lebowski became a cult hit. “Your revolution is over, Mr Lebowski. Condolences. The bums lost,” the Big Lebowski tells his laid-back namesake. In fact the bums, as embodied by the Dude, win.
David Huddleston was born on September 17 1930 at Vinton, Virginia. His father was an iron worker, and until he was 10 or 12 he grew up in a house with no electricity or running water.
As a child he appeared in community theatre productions, minstrel shows and children’s pageants and, after serving as a mechanic in the US Air Force, he attended the American Academy of Dramatic Arts on the GI Bill.
He began his career on the stage and appeared in several Broadway productions.
In 1984 he played opposite Dustin Hoffman’s Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman as Charlie, Willy’s only true friend, one critic describing him as “radiating a quiet benovolence as expansive as his considerable girth”. When he took the role of Benjamin Franklin in a 1997 Broadway production of the stage musical 1776, he regarded it as his “crowning achievement”.
He got his first break in Hollywood in the 1972 Civil War film Bad Company, in which he played a gang leader. But it was comedy for which he became best known. He took the title role in Santa Claus: the Movie (1985) opposite Dudley Moore. His other film credits included Fools’ Parade (1971), Family Reunion (1981) and The Producers (2005).
He worked twice with John Wayne, in Rio Lobo (1970) and McQ (1974), Wayne’s first “cop” picture, recalling how, on the last day of shooting, he had called by Wayne’s dressing room to thank him for casting him in the picture. “Well, by God, you’d do the same for me, wouldn’t you?” the star replied.
Huddleston also made guest appearances in television series such as Gunsmoke and The West Wing and was nominated for an Emmy for his role as Grandpa Arnold in the ABC comedy-drama The Wonder Years.
He is survived by his wife Sarah Koeppe, a casting agent whom he met while making Santa Claus, though they did not marry until 1999, when they exchanged vows in the Tunnel of Love Drive-Thru in Las Vegas. He is also survived by a son, the actor Michael Huddleston.
David Huddleston, born September 17 1930, died August 2 2016
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