Ben Cooper

Born September 30, 1933 in Hartford, Connecticut, Ben Cooper made his Broadway stage acting debut at the age of nine in the comedy “LIfe With Father.” “He was the right height, he was handsome and he knew the text, so they recruited me,” he would recall in an interview. The play was so successful that it lasted more than seven years on the bill, so when he grew up, the boy played two of the four children of the leading family.  

Soon he was offered to appear in the cinema, especially in westerns. “They let me play cowboys and they paid me for it,” she recalled. “I was riding my own horse at the age of twelve. I didn’t know they had stuntmen, so when I saw tricks on the screen in a movie, I would practice until I could do them myself.” He appeared in westerns like The Outcast , alongside John Derek , or  Woman They Almost Lynched . 

Moviegoers will most remember Ben Cooper  for his work on Johnny Guitar , where he played Turkey Ralston, the younger henchman of the outlaw Dancin’ Kid. Billó in the scene in which he tells his boss’s lover, and owner of the premises, Vienna ( Joan Crawford ), that he will protect her with his revolver, flaunting it, which unleashes the wrath of the gunman turned guitarist who brought Sterling Hayden to life . The role of him was about to be played by Paul Newman , who ultimately scrapped the project.

In 1960,  Ben Cooper married another actress, Pamela Raymond ( Alaska, Land of Gold ), to whom he was united until she died in 2008. He repeated with Hayden in The Last Order , a reconstruction of the Alamo disaster. In the legendary The Rose Tattoo , an adaptation of the Tennessee Williams play  starring Anna Magnani and Burt Lancaster , he gave life to sailor Jack Hunter. Starting in the 1960s, he dedicated himself almost exclusively to television series, some of them very successful, such as Bonanza . He was active for many years, as he did not retire after the TV  movie Kung Fu: The Legend Continues , from 1995.