Bill Cobbs, rich-voiced character actor who ranged from blaxploitation to The Bodyguard – obituary
Bill Cobbs, who has died aged 90, was an American character actor whose 50-year career encompassed the blaxploitation era, major hits like The Bodyguard (1992), primetime sitcoms and HBO drama, chancy independent features, and – in the case of Moses in the Coens’ fantasia The Hudsucker Proxy (1994) – a role as a custodian of the universe, ensuring that everything within his jurisdiction runs like clockwork.
Such symbolic parts came frequently to Cobbs, an upright six-footer blessed with a reflective mien and rich, mellifluous voice. Moses introduces himself with the line “I ’spect Moses knows just about everything,” and the Coens were not the only filmmakers who sensed in Cobbs a deep reservoir of wisdom.
That was partly attributable to years in the wilderness. Cobbs made his screen debut well into his 30s, having worked as a US Air Force radar technician and a car salesman. Only in 1970, aged 36, did he leave his native Cleveland for New York; even then, he found himself having to support his theatrical aspirations by driving cabs and selling toys.
This history informed terrific supporting turns as the jazz pianist Del Paxton in Tom Hanks’s genial directorial debut That Thing You Do! (1996), and as a bluesman expressing a distaste for folk in A Mighty Wind (2003); it also bolstered Star Trek lore when Cobbs was cast as Dr Emory Erickson, creator of the transporter that beamed up Kirk and Co, in the TV spin-off Enterprise (2001-05).
Yet his speciality was earthbound, working men – a bartender sassing the newly flush Eddie Murphy in Trading Places (1983), and the disgruntled security guard Reginald in Night at the Museum (2006) and its sequels. “I liked entertaining,” Cobbs told one interviewer, “but I was always drawn to some kind of technical work, some kind of honest labour.”
He was born Wilbert Francisco Cobbs on June 16 1934, one of two sons of David Cobbs, a Cleveland construction worker, and Vera, née Foster. An early encounter with The Wizard of Oz (1939), he recalled, “impressed me with the idea that you already have the things in life that you are looking for. You have great capabilities within yourself, and you just need to be made aware of that.”
After graduating from East Tech High School and leaving the Air Force, he began acting at the Karamu House Theater in Cleveland, a bedrock of black theatre which had nurtured Langston Hughes in the 1930s. He fell into it by chance: “I was doing a favour for a customer. I had sold this guy a car, and he asked me if I’d like to be in a play.”
He joined New York’s Negro Ensemble Company in 1971 before making a fleeting screen debut, as “Man on Platform”, in The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974). He had a handful of lines in the poolhall drama The Color of Money (1986) and Clint Eastwood’s Charlie Parker biopic Bird (1988). That same year, he played the serene chauffeur Hoke on stage in Alfred Uhry’s Driving Miss Daisy – and then watched Morgan Freeman motor off with the role in the Oscar-winning film.
In the 1990s Cobbs landed parts with greater impact: toppling Wesley Snipes’s kingpin Nino Brown in New Jack City (1991) and reframing gentrification as a horror story in Wes Craven’s The People Under the Stairs (1991). He was Whitney Houston’s manager Delaney in The Bodyguard; an LAPD elder, again tailing Snipes, in Demolition Man (1993); and Coach Chaney in Air Bud (1997), a Disney flick about a basketball-playing golden retriever that spawned an unlikely franchise.
A stroke in 1998 briefly stalled his late-career progress, but Cobbs resurfaced in quality TV, his credentials ever more impeccable: as a pastor in The Sopranos (2000), guesting on Six Feet Under (2001) and The West Wing (2002). He was another priest in Robert Duvall’s film Get Low (2009), and – bringing his artistic life full circle – a Resistance leader in Sam Raimi’s The Wizard of Oz prequel, Oz the Great and Powerful (2013).
Cobbs earned a belated Emmy nomination as friendly neighbour Mr Hendrickson in Dino Dana (2017-20); seemingly tireless, he also appeared in the finale of Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D (2020) as “Old Man”, a veteran of the ongoing intergalactic struggle between good and evil.
One of his earliest stage roles, a 1969 revival of Ossie Davis’s Purlie Victorious, “taught me there were a lot of things I could say […] that were very important, that were meaningful things in addition to entertaining,” he recalled. “Art is somewhat of a prayer, isn’t it?”
Bill Cobbs, born June 16 1934, died June 25 2024
