Bella Thurman

Bill Thurman was born on November 4, 1920 in Texas. A large, rugged, stocky man with a hard, lined, puffy face, a deep, twangy, amicable voice, a strong, bulky build, and a charmingly low-key and down-to-earth, unaffected natural screen presence, Thurman often portrayed police officers and assorted scruffy redneck types in a huge number of Southern-fried fright flicks and drive-in fare made throughout the 1960s and 1970s. He frequently acted in features for independent filmmaker Larry Buchanan; said movies include "The Eye Creatures," "High Yellow," "Zontar the Thing from Venus," "Mars Needs Women," "Curse of the Swamp Creature," "In the Year 2889," "It's Alive!," and "A Bullet for Pretty Boy." Thurman also had bit parts in two Steven Spielberg films: he appears as a hillbilly hunter in "The Sugarland Express" and as an air traffic controller in "Close Encounters of the Third Kind." His other memorable roles include the abusive Coach Popper in Peter Bogdanovich's "The Last Picture Show," a doomed hitchhiker in "Keep My Grave Open," a corrupt sheriff in "'Gatorbait," a mean small town deputy in "Ride in a Pink Car," a more amiable sheriff in "Creature from Black Lake," Cheryl "Rainbeaux" Smith's father in "Slumber Party '57," a priest in "The Evictors," and the boozy, dissolute Reverend Bill McWiley in "Mountaintop Motel Massacre." Bill Thurman died in Dallas, Texas on April 13, 1995.