Robert Forster

Born in Rochester, New York, on July 13, 1941, Robert Wallace Forster, Jr., became interested in acting while attending Madison High School, where he acted in musicals, in which he had to sing and dance. After graduating with a degree in psychology from the University of Rochester in 1963, he enrolled in drama classes at the Theater of the East, also in Rochester. He made his New York theater debut in 1965 with “Mrs. Dailey Has a Lover.”

He first appeared in the cinema in 1967 with John Huston ‘s Reflections in a Golden Eye , with Brando and Taylor in the main roles, where he gave life to a soldier. He highlights his work as the brother-in-law of Anouk Aimée , a Jew married to a banker in Alexandria divided between Muslims and Jews, just before World War II, in George  Cukor and  Joseph Strick ‘s Justine . At the beginning of his career, he also appeared in titles such as  The Night of the Giants ,  The Don is Dead  and in series such as  Police Story , Banyon and Nakia . , but later his star faded and he ended up relegated to roles in B-series productions. In one of them, The Beast Under the Asphalt , he would become friends with Bryan Cranston , then a young assistant in the special effects section, with whom he would return to work on Breaking Bad . In another of these spin-offs,  Delta Force ,  he was matched up with the tough  Chuck Norris  and  Lee Marvin .

“When I started, I had five good years, but then I stagnated,” he commented. In these unlucky years, he also divorced in 1973 his wife, June Provenzano, with whom he had had three children. One of them, Kate Forster, has tried to follow in the footsteps of her father, in the world of acting, but she has hardly had any luck. In the late 1970s he was also in a relationship with Zivia, his second wife, and later with the young actress Denise Grayson.

Robert Forster was  rescued from oblivion by  Quentin Tarantino  in  Jackie Brown . “I had done a casting for Reservoir Dogs , but they didn’t take me,” the actor recalled in an interview. “Much later I met Tarantino in a cafeteria, and he told me that he was writing an adaptation of the novel “Rum Punch”, by Elmore Leonard , that I had to read it to me. I told him that every day I started the day having breakfast in that place Six months later, I meet him again, sitting in my seat and he tells me that he had finished the script and had a part for me.” In the film he plays Max, a guy in the employ of a dangerous drug dealer ( Samuel L.) who pays to get a flight attendant he uses as a courier ( Pam Grier ) out of jail. For his work, the Academy nominated him in the category of best secondary, but lost to Robin Williams , who won the statuette for Good Will Hunting . In any case, he was back on the map, so from that moment on he was recruited again for important roles, such as a psychiatrist in Psycho , a colonel in  Yo, myself and Irene , FBI director in Los Charlie’s Angels. Full Throttle , George Clooney ‘s father-in-law in The Descendants, general in Objective: London ,  or detective in  The Slevin Case  and  Mulholland Drive , by David Lynch , which made him the sheriff of the town where the new episodes shot in 2017 of  Twin Peaks took place . 

In the series arena, he made his mark as Ed the extractor, a salesman of vacuum cleaners who actually provides new identities for fugitives, in the “Granite State” episode of  Breaking Bad (5th season ). He reprized as this character in  El camino. A Breaking Bad movie . At the time of his death, he had just finished filming a chapter of the new episodes of Amazing Tales .