Herbert “Cowboy” Coward obit

'Cowboy' Coward of 'Deliverance' fame killed in crash

 

He was not on the list.

CLYDE, N.C. (WLOS) — Herbert “Cowboy” Coward, who played the Toothless Man in "Deliverance," was killed in a crash Wednesday afternoon in Haywood County.

North Carolina State Highway Patrol officials said Coward's 78-year-old girlfriend Bertha Brooks was also killed in the crash, which happened about 3:30 p.m. on U.S. 19/23 between Clyde and Canton.

The couple's Chihuahua and Coward's pet squirrel were also killed, authorities said.

Troopers said Coward, 85, left a doctor's office and was hit by a pickup truck driven by a 16-year-old. Neither Coward nor Brooks were wearing seat belts. Troopers said the teen driver was not speeding.

No charges have been filed.

He played one of two sadistic mountain men in John Boorman's 1972 film Deliverance (with Bill McKinney), and several of his lines became infamous in pop culture.

The chilling 1972 classic “Deliverance" was shot primarily in Rabun County in northeastern Georgia, and some of the actors were locals.

“He got a real purty mouth, ain’t he?” – is one of the movie's most infamous lines, and it came from Coward, who told News 13 most of his lines were improvised.

Coward got his acting start at Ghost Town in the Sky, where he performed daily shoot-outs at the wild-west-themed amusement park.

His big break came thanks to then-budding actor, Burt Reynolds, who also worked at the Maggie Valley mountainside attraction.

Coward was born in 1938 in Haywood County, North Carolina, the ninth child of Fred and Moody Parker Coward. His mother died at a young age, so he left school and began working a variety of itinerant labor jobs to help support the family, including at an orchard and operating heavy machinery. After getting married in the early 1960s and briefly living in Raleigh, he moved back to the mountains with his wife when she became homesick.

After returning home, a friend offered Coward a job as an outlaw gunfighter at an Old West ghost town amusement park in Maggie Valley. While performing at the park with an assortment of acting school students working over their summer break, locals, and professional actors, an accident with a prop pistol resulted in two of his front teeth being knocked out. Known actors, including Dan Blocker who starred on Bonanza, performed at the park, and one summer, based on his appearances on Gunsmoke, Burt Reynolds appeared there. During this time, Reynolds and Coward became friends. In 1970, when Deliverance began filming in Rabun County, Georgia, Blocker mentioned to producers that Coward would be an ideal person for a role in the film; they were unable to locate him, so wrote his name on a potential cast board as "Cowboy Coward". Reynolds saw this and called Coward to recruit him for the role, telling the producers "...he can’t write or anything, but I’m telling ya, if we can get him, we got something special. Let me bring him in. His name’s Cowboy, and he’ll just talk to you, and you see if you like him." Coward was subsequently cast as "Toothless Man", one of the two sadistic mountain men encountered in the woods by Reynolds and the film's other protagonists. Like the others in the film, Coward performed his own stunts, including being lowered off a cliff into a river.

After appearing in the film, Coward worked at the BASF factory in Asheville, North Carolina for 27 years. He also appeared in one other film, Ghost Town: The Movie (2007), and on television's Hillbilly Blood in 2013.

Cowboy Coward was featured in an episode of the Discovery Channel show "Moonshiners". He plays the caretaker of the abandoned amusement park "Ghost Town" and two of the show's moonshiners meet with him to ask if they can hide their bootleg whiskey in the abandoned town to let it age.