Robert Forster

Robert Forster made his debut in John Huston's Reflections in a Golden Eye in 1967 and landed a lead the next year in Medium Cool, the landmark New Hollywood film that should have made him a star. Instead he spent the next three decades grinding through over a hundred roles - Captain Dan Holland in The Black Hole, a detective hunting an alligator, a colonel in The Delta Force - always solid, rarely centered. Then Quentin Tarantino cast him as Max Cherry, the weary bail bondsman in Jackie Brown, and in 1997 he was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. The recognition didn't slow him down: he worked steadily through the 2000s and into the next decade, playing a general in Olympus Has Fallen and its sequel, a father losing his wife in What They Had. His last stretch brought two roles that became cult touchstones: Ed "The Disappearer" Galbraith in Breaking Bad's penultimate episode, a performance that won him a Saturn Award and that he reprised in El Camino and Better Call Saul, and a return to Twin Peaks in 2017. He died in October 2019, days before El Camino premiered, still working.