Tom Bower

Tom Bower
PerformerRDM
Portrays:	Joe
Date of Birth:	January 3, 1938
Date of Death:	May 30, 2024
Age at Death:	86
Nationality:	USA
Related Media
		@ BW Media
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IMDb profile

Tom Bower (born Ralph Thomas Bower; January 3, 1938 – May 30, 2024) was an American actor and producer born in Denver, Colorado. He portrayed the bartender Joe in the Battlestar Galactica Re-imagined Series episode "Taking a Break From All Your Worries". Over a five-decade career he accumulated more than 180 screen credits, with his most sustained recognition coming from his recurring role as Dr. Curtis Willard on The Waltons, his role as Marvin the janitor in Die Hard 2 (1990), and a body of independent film work that brought him into repeated collaboration with directors including Robert M. Young, Ed Harris, Scott Cooper, and Werner Herzog.

Career

Early life and training

Bower grew up in Denver, Colorado, where he played varsity baseball, basketball, and football, and ran track. He described himself as an extraordinary athlete who until about age twenty fully believed baseball and later golf would be his livelihood. Torn ligaments and a sore arm from throwing curveballs prematurely ended that prospect. He later described the sliver separating the truly gifted from the very good as what determines the professional, and turned to acting through local theater groups and university productions in Denver. He described the moment he chose his senior play over his final baseball season as the point at which his course was set.

Following graduation — and a season of summer stock at Elitch Gardens Summer Theater in Denver, which he described as the oldest summer stock theater in the United States — he went to New York City. In 1956, at seventeen, he enrolled at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, where Robert Redford was a classmate, though neither was known at the time. After a year and a half at the Academy he shifted to the John Cassavetes Shadows Workshop, and participated in the making of Cassavetes's debut feature Shadows, shot in 1957 over ten weeks with a 16mm camera and an improvisational method.

After Shadows, Bower worked as a private investigator in Boston, often alongside attorney F. Lee Bailey. He co-founded the Boston Repertory Theater during this period, where he taught acting classes to Al Pacino. While still working as a detective in 1972, Bower was cast in David Rabe's The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel opposite Pacino; the production moved to Broadway and won a Tony Award in 1977. He then drove to Los Angeles in a Volkswagen to pursue full-time screen acting, picking up early television roles on Get Christie Love!, Kojak, and The Rockford Files before landing on The Waltons.

Television career

Bower's most sustained early television role was on The Waltons (CBS). He first appeared as stunt pilot Rex Barker in a fourth-season episode, then returned as Dr. Curtis Willard in Season 5. Willard was a physician who married Mary Ellen Walton, portrayed by Judy Norton; Bower appeared in 27 episodes of the series. The character was written out in 1978 — killed off-screen at Pearl Harbor. In a 2022 conversation with Norton on her YouTube channel, Bower recalled that his departure followed a request for a modest pay increase, summarizing the outcome as being "sent to Pearl Harbor." He also noted in that conversation that Waltons star Ralph Waite had been displeased when Bower appeared more polished in his second season, and that he considered Waite's instinct correct in hindsight. Bower attended the series' 45th anniversary reunion in Schuyler, Virginia, in March 2017, held in conjunction with the first anniversary of the death of Waltons creator Earl Hamner Jr.

His television guest work was wide-ranging. Early credits beyond The Waltons included The Blue Knight, The Bionic Woman, Baretta, Lou Grant, Barnaby Jones, Hill Street Blues, Miami Vice, Dallas, and Murder, She Wrote. Later appearances included NYPD Blue, The X-Files, The West Wing, The Practice (as John Pierce), Law & Order, Cold Case, and the HBO film The Laramie Project (2002), in which he played Father Roger Schmit. He played Marion Bartlett — the stepfather who is among the first victims of Charles Starkweather — in the ABC miniseries Murder in the Heartland (1993), opposite Tim Roth and Fairuza Balk. In his later years he had recurring roles on It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia (as Pop-Pop, 2005 and 2012), Ray Donovan, Bosch, and Lucky Hank (2023, AMC), where he played Henry Devereaux Sr., the estranged father of Bob Odenkirk's title character.

Film career

Bower's first significant film role was Boone Choate, the deputy whose imprecise translation of a Spanish exchange triggers a fatal misunderstanding and launches a massive manhunt, in The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez (1982), directed by Robert M. Young and produced by and starring Edward James Olmos. The film was later selected for preservation in the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress. A 2016 cast-and-crew panel recorded in Los Angeles — preserved on the Criterion Collection Blu-ray release (2018) — brought Bower together with Olmos, Young, producer Moctesuma Esparza, and co-stars Bruce McGill, Rosanna DeSoto, and Pepe Serna.

His lead performance in Wildrose (1984), an independent drama set in a Minnesota iron mine co-starring Lisa Eichhorn, earned him a nomination for the Independent Spirit Award for Best Male Lead at the inaugural ceremony in 1986, alongside nominees including Rubén Blades and Treat Williams. The film also received a Gold Hugo nomination at the Chicago International Film Festival.

In 1985 he appeared in The Lightship, directed by Jerzy Skolimowski and co-starring Robert Duvall and Klaus Maria Brandauer, as a crew member called Coop. He played Detective Bennett in River's Edge (1986), directed by Tim Hunter, a film that earned a year-end top-ten placement from Chicago Tribune critic Gene Siskel.

He played Marvin, the airport janitor who teams up with Bruce Willis's Lt. John McClane to thwart a terrorist cell, in Die Hard 2 (1990); Marvin drives the reunited McClanes away from the airport in the film's final scene. Bower later cited Marvin, Cecil Skell in True Believer (1989), and an uncredited turn as a helicopter pilot in Clear and Present Danger (1994) as among his favorite roles, noting that people he met could often recite his characters' dialogue more readily than he could himself. He discussed the Die Hard 2 production, his work on Beverly Hills Cop II (1987), and High Crimes (2002) in a career retrospective interview recorded for the SAG-AFTRA Foundation's Legacy Collection.

He played Francis Nixon, the 37th President's father, in Oliver Stone's Nixon (1995), starring Anthony Hopkins. He appeared as Sgt. Cally in Brian De Palma's Raising Cain (1992); he discussed the film, his fellow cast members, and De Palma's visual style in an eight-minute interview — titled "The Cat's in the Bag" — produced for the Scream Factory Collector's Edition Blu-ray (2016).

He appeared in both Pollock (2000) and Appaloosa (2008) for Ed Harris, a colleague from his years at the Met Theatre. He appeared in both Crazy Heart (2009) — as Bill Wilson, the agent of Jeff Bridges's character Bad Blake — and Out of the Furnace (2013) for Scott Cooper, with whom he had previously co-starred in Bill's Gun Shop (2001), an independently produced Minneapolis crime film. He played Pat McDonagh, the recovering-alcoholic father of Nicolas Cage's corrupt detective, in Werner Herzog's Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (2009). He appeared in The Hills Have Eyes (2006) and in Casey Affleck's post-apocalyptic Light of My Life (2019), where he played a devout man who confronts the film's central father-and-daughter pair; Owen Gleiberman in Variety wrote that Bower, "as a Bible thumper who has lost everything he cares about, has presence." He also appeared in Vince Gilligan's El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie (2019) as Lou, a former neighbor of Todd Alquist's.

As a producer, Bower worked on several independent films. He was executive producer on Human Error (2004), directed by Robert M. Young and based on Richard Dresser's play Below the Belt; co-producer on Bill's Gun Shop (2001); and associate producer on Neither Wolf Nor Dog (2016), director Steven Lewis Simpson's adaptation of Kent Nerburn's novel, with Dave Bald Eagle in the lead role — a film that ran in more than 200 theaters across North America through a self-organized distribution campaign.

Stage work and theater producing

Bower accumulated more than eighty stage credits across productions in Los Angeles, Chicago, Minneapolis, and other cities. He was a board member of the Met Theatre in Hollywood, whose company included James Gammon, Ed Harris, Amy Madigan, Holly Hunter, and Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Beth Henley. As a producer he mounted world premieres of John Patrick Shanley's Italian American Reconciliation at the Gnu Theater in Los Angeles (1987), Tom Grimes's Spec at the Met Theatre (1991), and Murray Mednick's Scar starring Ed Harris at the Met Theatre (1992). He was a lifetime member of the Actors Studio.

In 1981, Bower was invited by Robert Redford to serve as a resource actor at the inaugural Sundance Institute Filmmakers Lab; he returned in 1985, remained active there for years, and served on the Institute's nominating committee.

Union leadership

Bower joined both SAG and AFTRA in 1973. He served on the SAG National Board of Directors from 1995 to 2002, on the Hollywood Board, and on numerous committees including the SAG TV Residual Study, Global Rule One, Communications, National Agents Relations, and National New Technologies committees. He co-created what became SAGindie, the program that guides independent filmmakers through the union signatory process.

As co-chair of SAG's Global Rule One committee, Bower publicly defended the union's 2002 initiative to enforce its membership rules on American productions shot outside the United States. When Canadian producers challenged the measure as unlawful, he responded that SAG's legal department had researched the question extensively, and that producers working abroad without SAG contracts had long avoided pension and health contributions owed to members. Fellow SAG member Mark Moses noted after Bower's death that his union contributions benefited all members.

From 2005 until his death Bower served as President of the Jury and President of the Honorary Advisory Committee of the Syracuse International Film Festival, and in 2011 received the Festival's Sophia Lifetime Achievement Award. He won Best Actor at the Hollywood Film Festival in 2012 for the short film A Good Thing.

Battlestar Galactica

Bower appeared in the third-season Battlestar Galactica episode "Taking a Break From All Your Worries" (2007), as Joe, the civilian bartender who runs Joe's bar aboard the Galactica. In the episode, Apollo introduces Chief Tyrol to the newly established drinking establishment, a makeshift lounge on one of the hangar decks. The episode's title came from a lyric in the Cheers theme song; it originally reflected a plan for the story to revolve more centrally around the bar's creation, but the narrative shifted during development. Joe's bar appeared in later episodes, though the character Joe did not.

Personal life

Bower married twice; his first marriage ended in divorce. He later married Ursula Bower, who predeceased him in August 2023 at the age of 75. They were married 51 years and, according to his sister-in-law, never spent a day apart. They had four grandchildren. His family described the three most important things in his life as his wife, acting, and his commitment to fairness for fellow actors.

Bower died in his sleep at his home in Los Angeles on May 30, 2024. His death was confirmed to The Hollywood Reporter by his sister-in-law, Mary Miller. He is interred at Hollywood Forever Cemetery in Hollywood, California.

References