Boothe made his national breakthrough in 1980 starring as a true-life demagogue and cult-leader in the CBS docudrama Guyana Tragedy: The Story of Jim Jones, putting his menacing charisma into overdrive as the preacher who led 980 of his followers to commit mass suicide. Released just two years after the real incident, Boothe won an Emmy for his portrayal, which drew dialogue from real tapes recorded by Jones as he instructed his flock to consume poisoned fruit punch.
If the performance typecast him as a roguish megalomaniac, there was still no shortage of roles for Boothe. He was the grinning, sociopathic “Curly Bill,” terrorizing the citizens of 1993’s Tombstone, and the lawman’s old friend turned bloodthirsty drug trafficker in 1987’s Extreme Prejudice. On HBO’s Deadwood, he played the volatile, ruthless saloon owner Cy Tolliver, who was just as deadly to his “friends” as he was to his rivals, and in 1995’s Sudden Death, he was the CIA agent holding the Vice President hostage at a hockey arena.
There were scattered good-guys throughout his filmography. The downed U.S. Air Force pilot who joins up with the ragtag Wolverine resistance against Communist invaders in 1984’s Red Dawn; the father searching the Amazon for his lost child in 1985’s The Emerald Forest; and he stepped into Humphrey Bogart’s fedora as Raymond Chandler’s iconic detective for the 1983-86 HBO series Philip Marlowe, Private Eye.
Mostly, Boothe walked that line between good and evil, displaying a ferociousness that was intimidating and a strength that was appealing, even endearing. He was the base commander in 1994’s Blue Sky, who has an affair with Jessica Lange, the wife of his chief nuclear engineer. He played stoic White House Chief Of Staff Gen. Alexander Haig, who brings bad news to an unraveling president in Oliver Stone’s 1995 drama Nixon. And Boothe was the disbelieving FBI agent, listening to the increasingly shocking story of a man who says his father hunted and killed demons who were posing as people in 2001’s Frailty (directed by his Tombstone costar Bill Paxton.)
In recent years, Boothe played the vice president who ascends to the highest office after the president is debilitated in Season 6 of Fox’s 24, and he played off his ominous presence as Col. Jim Faith, supervising Will Forte’s ingenious (but hapless) special operative in the 2010 cult-favorite comedy MacGruber. In Marvel’s The Avengers and ABC’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D, he played nefarious World Security Council leader Gideon Malick, and on TV’s Nashville, he played the manipulative, wealthy father of Connie Britton’s country star Rayna Jaymes.
