![]() ![]() ![]() Later in the year came “Henry & June,” a movie that afforded Ward the opportunity to stretch as an actor in ways he simply hadn’t before. Ward does a better job with the police sergeant in movies like this and the underrated ‘UFO,’ he sits back and takes everything in and plays the cynic who will really bother you only if you really bother him.” Baldwin, who is good at playing intelligence, is not so good here at playing an ex-con with a screw loose. Roger Ebert wrote: “The actors struggle manfully with their roles. Hoke Moseley, the cop who’s after Baldwin’s sociopathic Fred Frenger. In the quirky but painfully violent Alec Baldwin vehicle “Miami Blues,” Ward played Sgt. Ward, who didn’t quite cut it as superhero Remo Williams, has the rugged looks and good humor of a friendly desperado, while Bacon continues to move beyond his glamour-boy roots and prove himself as an actor.” The Washington Post said: “As the handymen, Bacon and Ward make a good team. “Tremors” made only $16 million, but it engendered enormous affection on the part of moviegoers on cable and home video and spawned six sequels and a TV series. I will always remember chatting about his love of Django Reinhardt and jazz guitar during our long hot days in the high desert. In Ron Underwood’s horror-comedy “Tremors,” one of several films that boosted Ward’s career and came out in 1990, Ward and Kevin Bacon showed enormous chemistry as a pair of handy men who end up saving a hardscrabble Nevada desert community when the town is beset by giant underground snakes, not unlike the sandworms of “Dune.” Co-star Bacon shared a memory of Ward online writing, “When it came to battling underground worms I couldn’t have asked for a better partner. A NASA investigation cleared Grissom of blame in the incident, but the way it was portrayed in “The Right Stuff” suggested that Ward’s Grissom had panicked and fired the explosive bolts as a result. 21, 1967, the command module interior caught fire and all three men aboard died), audiences were especially sensitive to the portrayal in “The Right Stuff.” The film chronicled the Project Mercury spacecraft incident in which the emergency explosive bolts fired after splashdown and blew the hatch off, causing the ship to flood. ![]() Perhaps because Grissom ultimately lost his life in service to NASA (he was command pilot on Apollo 1, but before its launch on Feb. Ward brought his trademark grit to his portrayal of the courageous, intelligent astronaut Gus Grissom in 1983’s “The Right Stuff,” Philip Kaufman’s epic story of the early space program. (The bodies of the three men were never found, so it is unclear whether they truly escaped or whether they simply drowned in San Francisco Bay.) The film was vastly more interested in the mechanics of the escape than in developing the three prisoners as characters. In Don Siegel’s “Escape From Alcatraz” (1979), Ward and Jack Thibeau played convict brothers who are partnered with Clint Eastwood’s Frank Morris in engineering the clever, daring purported escape from the Rock. The actor played President Reagan in the 2009 Cold War espionage thriller “Farewell,” directed by Christian Carion, and had a supporting role in the 2013 actioner “2 Guns,” starring Denzel Washington and Mark Wahlberg. He recurred on NBC’s “ER” as the father of Maura Tierney’s Abby Lockhart in 2006-2007 and guested on series including “Grey’s Anatomy,” “Leverage” and “United States of Tara.” ![]()
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