Veteran film and television actor Fred Ward, 79, best known for playing gruff, tough-guy roles in movies such as Tremors, Escape from Alcatraz and The Right Stuff, died on Sunday, his publicist said on Friday. No cause or place of death was released, as per his family’s wishes, publicist Ron Hofmann said. Fred Ward took a roundabout way into acting, after serving three years in the U.S. Air Force in the 1960s and then working as an Alaskan lumberjack, a boxer where his nose was broken three times and a short-order cook, according to a biography provided by Hofmann.
His career spanned more than four decades, starting with foreign films in the early 1970s and stretched through 2015 with his final role in the television series True Detective, according to his online IMBD page. He made his first American film appearance playing a cowboy in the 1975 film Hearts of the West. But his breakthrough role came when he starred opposite Clint Eastwood in the 1979 film Escape from Alcatraz.