L. Q. Jones obit

L.Q. Jones, ‘Wild Bunch’ Actor and Member of Peckinpah’s Posse, Dies at 94

He played bad guys in a bunch of Westerns and also directed, co-wrote and produced the cult sci-fi hit 'A Boy and His Dog.'

 

He was not on the list.

L.Q. Jones, the colorful character actor who worked on dozens of Westerns, including the Sam Peckinpah classics The Wild Bunch and Ride the High Country as a member of the famed filmmaker’s regular posse, has died. He was 94.

Jones died Saturday of natural causes at his home in the Hollywood Hills, his grandson Erté deGarces told The Hollywood Reporter.

Jones portrayed ranch hand Andy Belden on 25 episodes of NBC’s The Virginian over an eight-year span, was one of the bad guys who slipped a noose over Clint Eastwood’s neck in Hang ‘Em High (1968) and played a sheriff on the 1983-84 NBC primetime soap The Yellow Rose, starring Sam Elliott, Cybill Shepherd and Chuck Connors.

The Texas native also portrayed Clark County Commissioner Pat Webb, Robert De Niro’s nemesis, in Martin Scorsese’s Casino (1995) and country singer Chuck Akers in Robert Altman’s A Prairie Home Companion (2006), his final credit.

In a career that spanned more than five decades, Jones is perhaps best known for his turn as the bounty hunter T.C. in The Wild Bunch (1969). He and Strother Martin, as Coffer, “bring their depraved characters to life with a childish energy — they take great enjoyment from making killing into a contest as they jockey to claim who has a higher body count after each bloody encounter.” That’s how a Warner Bros. website promoting the film describes their performances.

Jones first worked with Peckinpah in 1960 on the short-lived NBC Western Klondike. He portrayed one of the four ruthless brothers who fight it out with Joel McCrea and Randolph Scott in Ride the High Country (1962) and was a Confederate soldier (and Warren Oates’ brother) in Major Dundee (1965).

He also played no-good characters who meet their untimely ends in Peckinpah’s The Ballad of Cable Hogue (1970) and Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid (1973).

“Sam was a genius and I loved him, but he was a basket case. He drove everybody nuts,” Jones said in a 2017 interview with Nick Thomas.

On the other side of the camera, Jones directed, co-wrote and produced A Boy and His Dog (1975), a cult black comedy set in the post-apocalyptic year of 2024 that starred Don Johnson and Jason Robards and was based on a novella by sci-fi legend Harlan Ellison.

He was born Justice Ellis McQueen Jr. on Aug. 19, 1927, in Beaumont, Texas, the son of a railroad worker. When he was young, his mother, Jessie, was killed in an automobile accident, and he was raised by relatives.

I had a horse by the time I was 8 or 9 and grew up around tough rodeo people — my uncle was into roping — so Westerns were easy and fun,” he said.

He served in the U.S. Navy and studied law at the University of Texas, where his roommate was future Daniel Boone star Fess Parker. After college, he bought a ranch in Nicaragua to make money on beans, corn and dairy, but that didn’t go as well as he had hoped.

 

Parker had moved to Hollywood and had appeared in a few films when he sent his college buddy a copy of the Leon Uris novel Battle Cry, which was about to become a big-budget Warner Bros. war movie directed by Raoul Walsh. Parker was playing a soldier in the adaptation.

“Fess encouraged me to come out and drew me a map on the back of a laundry-shirt stuffing showing how to get to the studio,” he recalled. “Within two days of arriving, I had the part of [Pvt.] L.Q. Jones in Battle Cry and probably would never have been in the business had it not been for Fess.”

McQueen liked the character’s name so much, he decided to adopt it as his stage name.

The newly minted L.Q. Jones kept extremely busy after that, appearing on such shows as Cheyenne, Gunsmoke, Laramie, Wagon Train, Lassie, Rawhide, Johnny Ringo, The Big Valley and Perry Mason — sometimes doing two or three series a week — and in films including Target Zero (1955) — his first of his many pairings with Martin, another Peckinpah regular — Elvis Presley’s Love Me Tender (1956) and Flaming Star (1960), Don Siegel’s Hell Is for Heroes (1962) and Walsh’s The Naked and the Dead (1958).

He said Stanley Kubrick offered him the role of Major T.J. “King” Kong that went to Slim Pickens in Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), but he was “tied up with another picture” and had to pass.

Working on a Peckinpah film could be a challenge, he noted in a wide-ranging interview for the website Camera in the Sun.

“If you’re not standing in the same place Sam envisioned it a thousand times for the year — and he’s not told anybody what it is — but if you’re not there in that particular place, he’s furious because you haven’t done your job right in his estimation. That fact that he hadn’t told you anything doesn’t make a difference,” he said. “And it doesn’t make a difference whether you’re Bill Holden or an extra. Those of us who’d worked with him — you notice he had a group that worked with him his whole career — just learned where to be, thinking the way Sam would think.”

In the mid-’60s, he and actor Alvy Moore formed the production company LQ/JAF, and they made four films: The Devil’s Bedroom (1964), which Jones also directed; The Witchmaker (1969); The Brotherhood of Satan (1971), which he co-wrote; and A Boy and His Dog, which he said served as George Miller’s inspiration for The Road Warrior.

“After doing A Boy and His Dog, I had a whole bunch of offers to direct and more money than it cost to make the picture, for chrissakes,” he said. “But I couldn’t see working all that time and all the effort to make that. So I just kept saying, ‘No,’ and I finally just said, ‘To hell with it,’ and just stopped and went on with the acting. Because by then I could pretty well pick and choose what I wanted to do.”

Survivors also include his children, Randy, Steve and Mindy.

Film

Year       Title       Role       Notes

1955      Battle Cry            Private L.Q. Jones             Credited as Justus McQueen

1955      An Annapolis Story          Watson               

1955      Target Zero         Private Felix O'Hara        

1956      Santiago               Digger  

1956      Toward the Unknown    2nd Lieutenant Sweeney             

1956      Between Heaven and Hell             Private Kenny Company G           

1956      Love Me Tender                Pardee Fleming                 Uncredited

1957      Men in War        Sergeant Davis

1957      Operation Mad Ball         Ozark   

1957      Gunsight Ridge Lazy Heart Ranch Hand

1958      The Young Lions                Private Donnelly               Uncredited

1958      Buchanan Rides Alone    Pecos Hill            

1958      The Naked and the Dead               Woodrow 'Woody' Wilson           

1958      Torpedo Run      Hash Benson     

1959      Warlock               Fen Jiggs              Uncredited

1959      Battle of the Coral Sea   Yeoman Halliday              

1959      Hound-Dog Man               Dave Wilson      

1960      The Gambler, the Nun and the Radio       Rodeo Rider       TV film

1960      Ten Who Dared                 Billy 'Missouri' Hawkins

1960      Flaming Star       Tom Howard     

1960      Cimarron             Millis    

1962      Ride the High Country    Sylvus Hammond             

1962      Hell Is for Heroes              Supply Sergeant Frazer

1963      Showdown         Foray    

1964      Iron Angel           Buttons               

1964      The Devil's Bedroom                       Director (credited as Justus McQueen)

1964      Apache Rifles     Mike Greer        

1965      Major Dundee   Arthur Hadley   

1966      Nevada Smith    Cowboy                Uncredited

1968      Stay Away, Joe Bronc Hoverty  

1968      The Counterfeit Killer     Hotel Clerk Hanging Party            

1968      Hang 'Em High   Loomis

1969      The Witchmaker                               Uncredited

1969      The Wild Bunch                 T.C.       

1970      The Ballad of Cable Hogue            Taggart                

1970      The McMasters                 Russel  

1971      The Hunting Party            'Hog' Warren     

1971      The Brotherhood of Satan            Sheriff  

1972      43: The Richard Petty Story          Ed Koler              

1972      The Bravos          Ben Lawler          TV film

1973      Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid             'Black' Harris     

1974      Mrs. Sundance Charlie Siringo   TV Movie

1975      A Boy and His Dog            Actor In Porno Film          Director

1975      White Line Fever              Buck     

1975      Winterhawk       Gates   

1976      Banjo Hackett: Roamin' Free       Sheriff Tadlock TV Movie

1976      Mother, Jugs & Speed    Sheriff Davey    

1979      Fast Charlie... the Moonbeam Rider         Floyd    

1982      The Beast Within              Sheriff Bill Pool

1982      Melanie                Buford Uncredited

1982      Timerider: The Adventure of Lyle Swann                Ben Potter          

1983      Sacred Ground Tolbert Coleman              

1983      Lone Wolf McQuade       Ranger Dakota Brown    

1988      Bulletproof         Sergeant O'Rourke         

1989      River of Death   Hiller    

1990      The Legend of Grizzly Adams       Reno     

1994      Lightning Jack    Sheriff Tom        

1995      The Friends of Harry       Senator               

1995      Casino   Commissioner Pat Webb              

1996      Tornado!              Ephram Thorne TV film

1997      The Edge              Styles   

1998      The Patriot          Frank    

1998      The Mask of Zorro            Jack 'Three-Fingered Jack'           

1999      The Jack Bull       Henry Ballard     TV film

2001      Route 666           Sheriff Bob Conaway      

2006      A Prairie Home Companion          Chuck Akers       

Television

Year       Title       Role       Notes

1955      Cheyenne           'Smitty'                 3 episodes

1956      Annie Oakley      Cal Upton / Ned Blane    2 episodes

1957      The Joseph Cotten Show: On Trial             Jedediah 'Jed' Boone      Episode: "Dog vs. Biddeford"

1957      The Silent Service             Jack Potter          Episode: "The Final War Patrol"

1958      Flight     (character unnamed)      Episode: "Window in the Sky"

1958      Men of Annapolis             Clint Parker         Episode: "Mister Fireball"

1958      Jefferson Drum Burdette              Episode: "The Keeney Gang"

1958      Perry Mason       Charles Barnaby                "The Case of the Lonely Heiress"

1958–62               Lassie    Attorney Blake 3 episodes

1959      Black Saddle       Jack Shepherd   Episode: "Client: Banks"

1959      Tightrope             Earl Bell                Episode: "The Frame"

1959      Wichita Town     Walter Episode: "Drifting"

1959      Laramie                John MacLean   Episode: "Dark Verdict"

1959      Wagon Train      'Squirrel' Charvanaugh   Episode: "The Old Man Charvanaugh Story"

1959–61               Tales of Wells Fargo        Striker   2 episodes

1960      Johnny Ringo     Billy 'Billy Boy' Jethro      Episode: "Four Came Quietly"

1960      Lock Up                'Tex'       Episode: "Death and Taxes"

1960      Buick-Electra Playhouse                Rodeo Rider       Episode: "The Gambler, the Nun and the Radio"

1960      Klondike               Joe Teel                3 episodes

1960      The Rebel            Otis Rumpf          2 episodes

1960      Two Faces West                (character unnamed)      Episode: "The Last Man"

1960      Laramie                Actor     Episode: "The Dark Trail"

1961      The Detectives Starring Robert Taylor     Betty Merriwether          Episode: "Kinfolk"

1961      The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp            'Tex'       Episode: "Casey and the Clowns"

1961      The Americans Yonts     Episode: "The Coward"

1961      Two Faces West                (character unnamed)      Episode: "The Noose"

1961      Laramie                Homer Episode: "Cactus Lady"

1961      Laramie                'Truk'     Episode: "Siege at Jubilee"

1961      Wagon Train      Lenny    Episode: "The Christopher Hale Story"

1962      Lawman               Ollie Earnshaw Episode: "The Bride"

1962      The Rifleman      Charley Breen    Episode: "Day of Reckoning"

1962      The Wide Country            Whicker               Episode: "Straitjacket for an Indian"

1962      Ben Casey            Stan Galloway    Episode: "The Fireman Who Raised Rabbits"

1962      Have Gun – Will Travel   'Little' Fontana Episode: "Lazarus"

1962      Have Gun – Will Travel   Bill Renn – Drifting Cowboy         Episode: "The Waiting Room"

1962      Laramie                Johnny Duncan Episode: "The Replacement"

1962      Laramie                Neeley Episode: "Among the Missing"

1962      Laramie                Frank Keefer      Episode: "Shadow of the Past"

1963      Have Gun – Will Travel   Hector Mackenby            Episode: "Debutante"

1963      Route 66              'Babe'    Episode: "Shall Forfeit His Dog and Ten Shillings to the King"

1963      Laramie                Sergeant              Episode: "The Stranger"

1963      Empire L.Q.        Episode: "The Convention"

1963      Perry Mason       Lewis     Episode: "The Case of the Badgered Brother"

1963      Wagon Train      Esdras   Episode: "Charlie Wooster—Outlaw"

1963      Wagon Train      Ike Truman         Episode: "The Robert Harrison Clarke Story"

1963      Rawhide               George Cornelius             Episode: "Incident at El Crucero"

1963–71               The Virginian      Andy Belden       25 episodes

1964      Wagon Train      Private James Jones        Episode: "The Duncan McIvor Story"

1964      Rawhide               Corporal Wayne                Episode: "Incident at Gila Flats"

1964      Rawhide               Luke       Episode: "The Race"

1965      Rawhide               P.J. Peters           2 episodes

1965      My Favorite Martian       Frank James       Episode: "The Time Machine Is Waking Up That Old Gang of Mine"

1966      A Man Called Shenandoah           Ben Lloyd             Episode: "Rope's End"

1966      Pistols 'n' Petticoats        1st Gunman        Episode: "Sir Richard of Wretched"

1966      ABC Stage 67      Deputy Episode: "Noon Wine"

1966      Bob Hope Presents the Chrysler Theatre                Hotel Clerk          Episode: "The Faceless Man"

1966      The Big Valley    Cort       Episode: "By Force and Violence"

1967      The Big Valley    Curtis    Episode: "Court Martial"

1967      The Big Valley    Earl Vaughan      Episode: "Showdown in Limbo"

1967      The Big Valley    Hutch    Episode: "Ambush"

1967      Bob Hope Presents the Chrysler Theatre                Ernie Packer       Episode: "The Lady is My Wife"

1967      The F.B.I.             Wesley Davis      Episode: "The Gold Card"

1967      Cimarron Strip   Barnes Episode: "The Battleground"

1967      Cimarron Strip   Lummy Episode: "The Search"

1967      Hondo   Allie       Episode: "Hondo and the Death Drive"

1968      The Big Valley    Gus Vandiver     Episode: "Fall of a Hero"

1969      Gunsmoke          Kittridge               Episode: "The Good Samaritans"

1969      Hawaii Five-O    Colonel Lew Cardell         Episode: "King of the Hill"

1969      Lancer   Slate Meek         Episode: "Blind Man's Bluff"

1970      Gunsmoke          Sumner Pendleton          Episode: "The Gun"

1970      Gunsmoke          Nix         Episode: "Albert"

1971      Alias Smith and Jones     Clint Weaver      Episode: "Stagecoach Seven"

1971      The F.B.I.             Al Tanner             Episode: "Dynasty of Hate"

1971      Cannon                 Phil Mackey        Episode: "Fool's Gold"

1971      Cade's County    Grover Curtis     Episode: "Delegate at Large"

1972      Gunsmoke          'Gecko' Ridley    Episode: "Tara"

1972      Alias Smith and Jones     Drunk    Episode: "The Men That Corrupted Hadleyburg"

1972      The Delphi Bureau           Cole       Episode: "The Man Upstairs-The Man Downstairs Project"

1972      The Bold Ones: The New Doctors               Dr. Dietrich         Episode: "A Purge of Madness"

1972      Alias Smith and Jones     Peterson              Episode: "McGuffin"

1973      Ironside                Harry Ashton      Episode: "The Caller"

1973      Kung Fu                Sergeant Straight             Episode: "An Eye for an Eye"

1973      Assignment Vienna         Actor     Episode: "A Deadly Shade of Green"

1973      Cannon                 Sheriff Virgil Spoontz      Episode: "Perfect Alibi"

1974      The Magician     Johnson               2 episodes

1974      Ironside                Cardiff   Episode: "Riddle at 24,000"

1975      Kung Fu                Major Clarke Bealson      Episode: "The Last Raid"

1975      Matt Helm          Actor     Episode: "Deadly Breed"

1976      Movin' On           Flakey Edwards Episode: "The Big Switch"

1976      Charlie's Angels                 Sergeant Billings               Episode: "Bullseye"

1977      McCloud              Kenny Hingle      Episode: "The Moscow Connection"

1978      CHiPs     Hoskins                 Episode: "Rustling"

1978      Charlie's Angels                 Dan Jarvis            Episode: "Angels in the Backfield"

1978      Columbo              Gun Dealer         Episode: "The Conspirators"

1978      The Eddie Capra Mysteries           Dr. Amos              Episode: "Dying Declaration"

1979      How the West Was Won               Batlin    Episode: "Luke"

1979      The Runaways   Matthew Turner               Episode: "They'll Never Forgive Me"

1979      The Incredible Hulk         Jake White          Episode: "Jake"

1979      The Dukes of Hazzard     Warren                 Episode: "Witness for the Persecution"

1979      Charlie's Angels                 Burdette              Episode: "Angel Hunt"

1980      Vega$    Everett Mason   Episode: "The Lido Girls"

1980      Charlie's Angels                 Sam Mason         Episode: "An Angel's Trail"

1980      The Incredible Hulk         Director                Episode: "On the Line"

1980      Enos      Garrett Episode: "Blu Flu"

1981      Walking Tall        John Whitter      Episode: "Hitman"

1981      Riker      Massey                 Episode: "Honkytonk"

1982      The Dukes of Hazzard     Morton                 Episode: "The Sound of Music – Hazzard Style"

1982      The Fall Guy        Sheriff Dwight Le Clerc   2 episodes

1983      Voyagers!            Ground Control #1           Episode: "All Fall Down"

1983–84               The Yellow Rose                Sheriff Lew Wallace         10 episodes

1984      Matt Houston    Sheriff Loftus     Episode: "The Monster"

1986      The A-Team        Chuck Danford Episode: "Cowboy George"

1991      The New Adam-12           Mr. Weaver        Episode: "Crack House"

1994      Walker, Texas Ranger     Billy Selkirk         Episode: "Deadly Reunion"

1994–96               Renegade            Nathan Wayne 5 episodes

2004      Dr. Vegas             'Hondo'                Episode: "All In"