Things weren’t going
well for Robert Forster
when he bumped
into director Quentin
Tarantino at a West Hollywood coffee
shop in the mid-1990s. A promis-
ing talent in the 1960s, the ruggedly
handsome actor had seen his career
plummet for 27 years, reducing him
to parts in grind-house flicks such as
Maniac Cop III and Satan’s Princess.
“I had four kids,” he said. “I took
any job I could get.” Tarantino told
Forster he was a fan of his early work
and that he was writing an adaptation of Elmore
Leonard’s novel Rum Punch. Forster thought
little of the encounter, but six months later
Tarantino returned to the coffee shop with the
script for Jackie Brown (1997) and a big role for
the 56-year-old Forster. His performance as Max
Cherry, a bail bondsman who falls for Pam Grier’s
title character, earned him an Oscar nomination
and a career renaissance. “For a guy who could
not get a job,” he said, “it’s just astounding.”
Forster was born in Rochester, N.Y., to a home-
maker mother and a father who trained circus
elephants, said The Washington Post. He was
studying at the University of Rochester, “mull-
ing a career as a lawyer,” when he auditioned fora student production of Bye Bye
Birdie to impress a girl in the play.
He fell in love with acting, and after
graduating appeared on Broadway
in Mrs. Dally Has a Lover. Forster
made his film debut in 1967’s
Reflections in a Golden Eye, play-
ing a soldier who “gallops naked
through the woods atop a black
stallion, catching the eye of Marlon
Brando and Elizabeth Taylor.”
Handed a tan jockstrap before film-
ing, Forster tossed it aside, telling
himself, “If you are afraid to be
naked on this horse, you’d better quit.”
He won acclaim for his role in 1969’s Medium
Cool, said VanityFair.com, playing a news cam-
eraman caught up in the chaos of the 1968
Democratic National Convention. That led to
lead roles in the NBC detective shows Banyon
and Nakia, but both “were canceled after one
season.” Forster then struggled for decades to
win quality parts, but after Jackie Brown he was
“inundated with offers,” said The Hollywood
Reporter. He appeared in David Lynch’s 2001
movie Mulholland Drive, the reboot of TV’s Twin
Peaks, and the hit show Breaking Bad. “If you’re
going to get a warm streak in a career,” he said in
2014, “it’s nice to get it during the back end.”Obituaries
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The actor who got a second shot with Jackie Brown
Robert
Forster
1941–2019In December 1944, Army
Pvt. Francis Currey was sit-
ting in a foxhole outside the
Belgian town of Malmedy
when a column of German
tanks sud-
denly rolled
out of the
mist. Currey
and several
other soldiers were forced to
take cover in an abandoned
paper factory, where they
found a bazooka—but no
ammunition. Currey, a lanky
19-year-old from upstate New
York, raced outside under
enemy fire to grab rockets
from a smashed U.S. half-
track. He loaded and fired
the bazooka, disabling a Nazi
tank, then fired again, col-
lapsing a house occupied
by enemy soldiers. Spotting
a group of GIs trapped in a
foxhole, he became a one-
man army, hurling grenades
at approaching tanks and
infantry and, when the gre-
nades ran out, blasting them
with a machine gun. Having
suffered heavy casualties, the
Germans retreated. Currey
was awarded the Medal of
Honor but always down-
played his bravery, saying,
“It was just one day of nine
months of steady combat.”
Raised on a farm in the
Catskill Mountains, Currey
“worked for an embalmer
during high school and
planned to enter the profes-
sion,” said The Washington
Post. But a week after his
graduation in 1943, he
decided to join the Army
instead. Currey shipped out to
Europe the following spring
and found himself in Belgium
during the Battle of the Bulge.
“By the time the European
war ended,” Currey had been
awarded a Silver Star, a
Bronze Star, and three Purple
Hearts, said The New York
Times. Back in the U.S., he
worked as a benefits coun-
selor at a veterans hospital
and ran a landscaping busi-
ness. Currey was made into
a GI Joe action figure in the
1990s, but didn’t seek acco-
lades or attention. “I got it,”
he said of his Medal of Honor.
“That’s all.”Francis
Currey
1925–201939
The Medal of Honor
recipient who fought
off a Nazi attackOn March 18, 1965,
Soviet cosmonaut
Aleksei Leonov left
the inflatable airlock
of his two-person Voskhod 2 capsule
and became the first person to walk
in space. Leonov spent 12 minutes
maneuvering outside the craft, mar-
veling at the stars as he orbited Earth
at 18,000 mph. But when he tried to
re-enter the capsule, Leonov found
he couldn’t fit through the hatch. His
pressurized spacesuit had ballooned in the vac-
uum of space and become almost rigid. Leonov
slowly deflated his suit by releasing oxygen, put-
ting himself at risk of decompression sickness,
and eventually squeezed back inside the space-
craft. “I was drenched with sweat, my heart rac-
ing,” he said, but that “was just the start of dire
emergencies which almost cost us our lives.”
Leonov was born in Siberia, one of 12 children
of a coal miner turned farmer and his wife,
said The New York Times. When Leonov was
3 years old, his father was “falsely denounced as
an enemy of the state” and sent to a gulag; he
was cleared and released several years later. At
age 6, Leonov “met a Soviet pilot and became
enthralled by aviation.” He joined the air force in
1953, trained as a fighter pilot, and in 1960 waspart of the first group selected for
cosmonaut training. It would be
decades before the world learned
how close Leonov and fellow cos-
monaut Pavel Belyayev came to
disaster on their historic mission,
said The Times (U.K.). While re-
entering Earth’s atmosphere, the
Voskhod 2 spun out of control
so furiously that “blood vessels
burst in the men’s eyes.” The
cosmonauts crashed in the remote
Siberian forest more than 1,000 miles from their
intended landing spot and spent two freezing
days in the wilderness awaiting rescue.
In 1969, Leonov had another brush with
death, said The Washington Post. He was in a
motorcade entering the Kremlin when a gun-
man opened fire; the shooter had wanted to kill
Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev. “I looked down,”
Leonov later said, “and saw two bullet holes
on each side of my coat where the bullets had
passed through.” He returned to orbit in 1975
for the first joint U.S.-Soviet space effort, docking
his capsule with an Apollo spacecraft. Through
a connecting portal, Leonov shook hands with
NASA astronaut Thomas Stafford. “If we could
have gotten together earlier,” Leonov said in
1990, “we would be flying to Mars right now.”Aleksei
Leonov
1934–2019The cosmonaut who made the first spacewalk