Sam Elliot biography

Synopsis

Early Life

Actor. Born August 9, 1944 in California. Sam Elliott grew up in Oregon, where he spent his time exploring the outdoors and watching movies. By the time he was 9 years old, he had decided on a career in acting. His father, who worked for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, was skeptical of his son's chosen profession. The two were unable to resolve those differences before the senior Elliott died of a heart attack when Sam was 18 years old. "He died thinking, 'Man, this kid is going to go down the wrong path,'" Elliott said in a later interview. "And I think on some levels that was either hard on me or made me more focused in my resolve to have a career."

Acting Debut

Elliott moved out to Hollywood and landed his first credited role: an appearance in the 1969 classic Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, in which Robert Redford and Paul Newman wowed audiences as the titular pair of Western outlaws. Elliott's role - "Card Player No. 2" - was somewhat less prominent. ("I think I was a shadow on a wall or something," Elliott joked.) As a bit player, Elliott never got a chance to speak with the film's leading lady, actress Katharine Ross, who was cast as Redford's lover. Nearly a decade later, however, Elliott and Ross would meet again while on the film The Legacy (1978). They soon fell in love. "Not a great film, but a legacy nonetheless for Katharine and me," Elliott quipped. Elliott and Ross married in 1984 and have one daughter.

Through the 1970s, Elliott found steady work in television roles on shows such as Mission: Impossible, Gunsmoke and Hawaii Five-O. He also played Evel Knievel in a TV biopic about the legendary motorcycle-jumping daredevil. Though Elliott's good looks could have placed him squarely in the heartthrob category, he shunned a conventional Hollywood career. He not only refused typical leading man roles, but began maintaining what would become his signature long hair and handlebar mustache (which he says takes "months, several months" to grow back if shaved off for a role). "I don't want to be known as a sex symbol," he told Playgirl magazine in 1976. "There's a great stigma that goes with that tag. I want to be a Sam Elliott."

Career Highlights

Being "a Sam Elliott" meant taking on more challenging, supporting roles in a wide array of films. Elliott earned serious fans with 1989's Road House, playing the mentor to Patrick Swayze's James Dalton, a bouncer with a mysterious past. His most beloved role, however, may have been his performance as The Stranger, the mysterious narrator of the Coen Brothers' cult classic The Big Lebowski (1998), which still inspires fans to approach him in the street begging him to say, just once, "The Dude abides."Elliott may be best known for his work portraying Western heroes and outlaws. Over the course of his career, he has played gun-slinging cowboys in both television shows and films including The Quick and the Dead (1987), Houston: The Legend of Texas (1986), Tombstone (1993) and You Know My Name (1999). For his work as an on-screen cowboy, Elliott was inducted in 2007 into the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum. Elliott has said of his penchant for Westerns: "I think it has something to do with integrity and a