One of the most in-demand character actors of his generation, LQ Jones, who has died aged 94, was often cast in westerns and war movies, in which his easy-going Texas drawl often concealed a streak of violence. This brought him into the director Sam Peckinpah’s stock company, and he played in five Peckinpah movies, most notably as TC, one of a posse of bounty hunters chasing after the Wild Bunch in the eponymous 1969 classic.
Jones once likened his version of the “heavy” to those played by Jack Elam or Warren Oates, as characters “not crazy or deranged … but rather someone who is a heavy because he enjoys being a heavy”. In The Wild Bunch his version anchors the craziness of fellow heavy Strother Martin, another of the posse, with whom Jones often worked.
