James Coburn - Wikipedia

Thank you, my friend Maj Marty Hogan for making us aware that August 31 is the anniversary of the birth of post-WWII U.S. Army truck driver who narrated training films while stationed in Germany and most notably American actor James Harrison Coburn III
Rest in peace James Harrison Coburn III

James Coburn Rare Interview (Bruce Lee’s Hollywood friend)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k05hu_wZ0O4

Images:
1. James Coburn with Muppets Getty_b.
2. Bob Bondurant teaching James Coburn in 1972
3. James Coburn and Ringo Starr rex_b.
4. James Coburn smoking a cigarette

1. Biography
2. GQ article

1. background from peoplepill.com/people/james-coburn-2/
Occupations Actor Screenwriter Film actor Television director Voice actor Television actor
A.K.A.Coburn, James Harrison Coburn III
Birth August 31, 1928 (Laurel, Cedar County, Nebraska, U.S.A.)
Death November 18, 2002 (Beverly Hills, Los Angeles County, California, U.S.A.)
Education Los Angeles City College, University of California, Los Angeles

Biography
James Harrison Coburn III (/dʒeɪmz ˈkoʊbɜːrrnˌˈkoʊbərn/; August 31, 1928 – November 18, 2002) was an American actor. He featured in more than 70 films, largely action roles, and made 100 television appearances during a 45-year career, ultimately winning an Academy Award in 1998 for his supporting role as Glen Whitehouse in Affliction.
A capable, rough-hewn leading man, his toothy grin and lanky physique made him a perfect tough guy in numerous leading and supporting roles in westerns and action films, such as The Magnificent Seven, Hell Is for Heroes, The Great Escape, Charade, Our Man Flint, In Like Flint, Duck, You Sucker!, and Cross of Iron. Coburn provided the voice of Henry Waternoose in the Pixar film Monsters, Inc.
During the late 1960s and early 1970s Coburn cultivated an image synonymous with "cool", and along with such contemporaries as Lee Marvin, Steve McQueen, and Charles Bronson became one of the prominent "tough-guy" actors of his day.

Early life
Coburn was born on August 31, 1928 in Laurel, Nebraska, the son of James Harrison Coburn II and Mylet Coburn. His father was of Scottish-Irish ancestry and his mother was an immigrant from Sweden. The elder Coburn had a garage business that was destroyed by the Great Depression. Coburn himself was raised in Compton, California, where he attended Compton Junior College. In 1950, he enlisted in the United States Army, in which he served as a truck driver and occasionally a disc jockey on an Army radio station in Texas. Coburn also narrated Army training films in Mainz, Germany. Coburn attended Los Angeles City College, where he studied acting alongside Jeff Corey and Stella Adler, and later made his stage debut at the La Jolla Playhouse in Herman Melville's Billy Budd. Coburn was selected for a Remington Products razor commercial in which he was able to shave off 11 days of beard growth in less than 60 seconds, while joking that he had more teeth to show on camera than the other 12 candidates for the part.

Career
Early work
Coburn's film debut came in 1959 as the sidekick of Pernell Roberts in the Randolph Scott western Ride Lonesome. Coburn also appeared in dozens of television roles including, with Roberts, several episodes of NBC's Bonanza. Coburn appeared twice each on two other NBC westerns Tales of Wells Fargo with Dale Robertson, one episode in the role of Butch Cassidy, and The Restless Gun with John Payne in "The Pawn" and "The Way Back", the latter segment alongside Bonanza's Dan Blocker. During the 1960 to 1961 season, Coburn co-starred with Ralph Taeger and Joi Lansing in the NBC adventure/drama series, Klondike, set in the Alaskan gold rush town of Skagway. When Klondike was cancelled, Taeger and Coburn were regrouped as detectives in Mexico in NBC's equally short-lived Acapulco. Coburn also made two guest appearances on CBS's Perry Mason, both times as the murder victim in "The Case of the Envious Editor" and "The Case of the Angry Astronaut." In 1962, he portrayed the role of Col. Briscoe in the episode "Hostage Child" on CBS's Rawhide.

Stardom
Coburn became well known in the 1960s and the 1970s for his tough-guy roles in numerous action and western films. He first appeared with Yul Brynner, Steve McQueen and Charles Bronson in the John Sturges film, The Magnificent Seven, and with Steve McQueen and Charles Bronson in The Great Escape, another Sturges film. Coburn played the part of a villainous Texan in the successful Charade (1963). He was then cast as a glib naval officer in Paddy Chayefsky's The Americanization of Emily. Coburn was signed to a seven-year contract with 20th Century Fox. His performance as a one-armed Indian tracker in Major Dundee (1965) gained him much notice.

Our Man Flint
In 1966, Coburn became a genuine star following the release of the James Bond parody film Our Man Flint. The following year, he was voted the twelfth biggest star in Hollywood.
In 1971, Coburn starred in the Zapata Western Duck, You Sucker!, with Rod Steiger and directed by Sergio Leone, as an Irish explosives expert and revolutionary who has fled to Mexico during the time of the Mexican Revolution in the early 20th century. Coburn teamed with director Sam Peckinpah for the 1973 film Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, in which he played Pat Garrett. The two had worked together in 1965 on Major Dundee.
In 1973 Coburn was voted the 23rd most popular star in Hollywood. Coburn, Steve McQueen and Chuck Norris were pallbearers of Bruce Lee's casket and Coburn was considered to be one of Lee's friends.

Peckinpah and Coburn turned next to Cross of Iron, a critically acclaimed war epic that performed poorly in the United States but was a huge hit in Europe. Peckinpah and Coburn remained close friends until Peckinpah's death in 1984. In 1973, Coburn was among the featured celebrities dressed in prison gear on the cover of the album Band on the Run made by Paul McCartney and his band Wings. Coburn returned to television in 1978 to star in a three-part mini-series version of a Dashiell Hammett detective novel, The Dain Curse, tailoring his character to bear a physical resemblance to the author. During that same year as a spokesman for the Joseph Schlitz Brewing Company, he was paid $500,000 to promote its new product in television advertisements by saying only two words: "Schlitz. Light." In Japan his masculine appearance was so appealing he became an icon for its leading cigarette brand. He also supported himself in later years by exporting rare automobiles to Japan. He was deeply interested in Zen and Tibetan Buddhism, and collected sacred Buddhist artwork. He narrated a film about the 16th Karmapa called "The Lion's Roar".

Final years
Because of his severe rheumatoid arthritis, Coburn appeared in very few films during the 1980s, yet continued working until his death in 2002. This disease had left Coburn's body deformed and in pain. "You start to turn to stone," he told ABCNEWS in an April 1999 interview. "See, my hand is twisted now because tendons have shortened." For 20 years he tried a host of conventional and unconventional treatments, but nothing worked. "There was so much pain that … every time I stood up, I would break into a sweat," he recalled. Then, at age 68, Coburn tried something called MSM, methylsulfonylmethane, a sulfur compound available at most health food stores. The result, he said, was nothing short of miraculous. "You take this stuff and it starts right away," said Coburn. "Everyone I've given it to has had a positive response." MSM did not cure Coburn's arthritis, but it did relieve his pain, allowing him to move more freely and resume his career.
He spent much of his life writing songs with British singer-songwriter Lynsey de Paul and working on television series, such as Darkroom. Coburn returned to film in the 1990s and appeared in supporting roles in Young Guns II, Hudson Hawk, Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit, Maverick, Eraser, The Nutty Professor, Affliction, and Payback. Coburn's performance in Affliction eventually earned him an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. In addition, he provided the voice of Henry J. Waternoose III in Disney/Pixar's Monsters, Inc.

Cars
Coburn's interest in fast cars began with his father's garage business and continued throughout his life, as he exported rare cars to Japan. Coburn was credited with having introduced Steve McQueen to Ferraris, and in the early 1960s owned a Ferrari 250 GT Lusso and a Ferrari 250 GT Spyder California SWB. His Spyder was the thirteenth of just fifty-six built. Coburn imported the pre-owned car in 1964, shortly after completing The Great Escape. The car was restored and sold for $10,894,400 to English broadcaster Chris Evans, setting a new world record for the highest price ever paid for an automobile at auction.

Cal Spyder #2377 was repainted several times during Coburn's ownership; it has been black, silver and possibly burgundy. He kept the car at his Beverly Hills-area home, where it was often serviced by Max Balchowsky, who also worked on the suspension and frame modifications on those Mustang GTs used in the filming of McQueen’s Bullitt. Coburn sold the Spyder in 1987 after twenty-four years of ownership. Over time he also owned the above-noted Lusso, a Ferrari Daytona, at least one Ferrari 308 and a 1967 Ferrari 412P sports racer.

Death and legacy
Coburn died of a heart attack on November 18, 2002 while listening to music at his Beverly Hills home. He was survived by his second wife, Paula (née Murad), two children and two grandchildren.

Critical analysis
In The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, critic David Thomson states that "Coburn is a modern rarity: an actor who projects lazy, humorous sexuality. It is the lack of neurosis, an impression of an amiable monkey, that makes him seem rather dated: a more perceptive Clark Gable, perhaps, or even a loping Midwest Cary Grant. He has made a variety of flawed, pleasurable films, the merits of which invariably depend on his laconic presence. Increasingly, he was the best thing in his movies, smiling privately, seeming to suggest that he was in contact with some profound source of amusement". Film critic Pauline Kael remarked on Coburn's unusual characteristics, stating that "he looked like the child of the liaison between Lt. Pinkerton and Madame Butterfly". George Hickenlooper, who directed Coburn in The Man from Elysian Fields called him "the masculine male". Andy García called him "the personification of class, the hippest of the hip", and Paul Schrader noted "he was of that 50's generation. He had that part hipster, part cool-cat aura about him. He was one of those kind of men who were formed by the Rat Pack kind of style."


2. Background from gq-magazine.co.uk/article/james-coburn-the-ultimate-sixties-tough-guy
Get to know James Coburn, the ultimate Sixties tough guy
By Sean Macaulay3 September 2015
Sean Macaulay revisits the time when we first saw James Coburn in the flesh. He reflects on the life of the legendary Hollywood movie star from his successes, tough times and the lavish lifestyle he lived as an iconic Sixties Tough Guy up until his death in 2002
James Coburn was the first Hollywood movie star I ever saw in the flesh. It was the late Seventies in north London and I was doing my morning paper round when, shimmering out of the early-morning haze of Highgate's Swains Lane, came the star of Our Man Flint, striding along past the row of suburban London villas with his trademark languid self-assurance. (He was dating pint-sized British songbird and local resident Lynsey de Paul at the time.) The effect was incandescent. Coburn didn't just look like a movie star off screen, he looked like an adolescent boy's Platonic ideal of a movie star.
He was rugged and tall (6ft 2in) with silvery-white hair that cried out for some gorgeous Nabokovian adjective: 'argent' or 'nacreous'.
He was wearing a corduroy jacket with rather epic lapels, I remember, and some kind of natty neck scarf.

I couldn't help but stare; he just looked so...deluxe. But he gave me a friendly little salute as he passed, which for a pimply youth still in Orange Tag flares was about as cool as it gets. I never forgot it.
Twenty years later, I moved to Los Angeles and crossed paths with an Englishwoman called Victoria who was cat-sitting for Coburn while he was travelling with his second wife. I got to tag along with her, visiting Coburn's house in Beverly Hills and duly admiring his collection of Chinese gongs, played intently on many a chat show. ("It's kind of like the sonic mirror of your soul," he told a bemused Michael Parkinson.) There was also an array of eye-popping Japanese erotica in the toilet and four of the fattest cats I'd ever seen. The house was more chintzy than I had expected, but it didn't dent the mystique.

For my generation, raised on Sunday afternoon repeats of The Magnificent Sevenand The Great Escape, Coburn was one of the great Sixties Tough Guys - part of that breed of hip macho actors like Steve McQueen and James Garner who bridged the gap between the square-jawed heroes of the Fifties (Charlton Heston, Burt Lancaster) and the neurotic anti-heroes of the Seventies, such as Al Pacino and Robert De Niro.
These Sixties Tough Guys were old-school without being square. They'd all served in the army or navy, but were shaped by the social liberation of the Fifties, so they smoked dope and broke the rules, whilst being grown-ups and not angst-ridden adolescents. The result was a style of acting that was intense and modern without the woe-is-me excesses of the Method. In a word, cool. As Coburn liked to say, "I'm a jazz kind of actor, not rock'n'roll."

If Steve McQueen was the era's King of Cool, then Coburn was the laid-back older brother, watching it all go by with a sardonic grin - often enough in real life, too. Robert Vaughn recalled emerging from a restaurant with Coburn while making
The Magnificent Seven in Mexico only to watch Coburn's shiny new Jaguar go crashing into a wall. As the dust settled, a drunken valet tumbled out headfirst to the ground. "I tell you what, Roberto," said Coburn, slapping a hand on Vaughn's shoulder, "we're never gonna get a taxi at this time of night." "Even then he had class," said Vaughn.
It was a quality that came up a lot when I spoke with various friends and relatives of Coburn: "Classy... A class act... A classy guy."
Katy Haber, who spent a decade as director Sam Peckinpah's Girl Friday, working with Coburn on three of Peckinpah's films including
Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, went further: "He was a prince." Among her mementoes is a photo of her and Coburn on the set of Pat Garrett in 1973. Amid the heat and dust of Durango, Coburn reclines on a director's chair in his sheriff costume, sporting distinctly non-Method mirror shades and a Gauloises in a cigarette holder. "Jimmy loved what being an actor gave him, where it took him," she said.

Many of his acquaintances described him as both a seeker and a man's man, an avidly curious soul who read widely on Eastern philosophy without forsaking the finer things in life. He did kung-fu and Chinese wand exercises, but savoured the finest cigars and clarets, and always kept a bottle of Stoli in the freezer.
He was simultaneously new age and old-school. He liked patchouli oil, but burned through stop signs in a string of Ferraris. (Broadcaster Chris Evans bought Coburn's old Spyder 250 GT in 2008 for £5.5 million, setting a new world record for the highest price paid for a vintage car at auction.) As he explained once: "I meditate, I take good care of myself, sure. I don't get too involved in the details." He wore 'elegant wolf' attire - blazers and silk polka dot handkerchiefs - but never stopped using the Beatnik slang of his New York bachelor days. "It's a groove and gas," he would say, or, "That's the jazz of it, man." He was groovy, macho and debonair as the decade required, appearing with everyone from Cary Grant to Kermit the Frog.

Even Tom Hanks gushed like a love-struck fan when he met Coburn at a party. He was, in short, Hollywood royalty.
Born James Harrison Coburn III in 1928, he grew up in Compton, Los Angeles, where his father was a garage mechanic. "I came from dustbowl folk," he said, "ordinary people who were stultified by the American Dream." The family had relocated from Nebraska after the Great Depression wiped out their Ford dealership, and Coburn always felt his father never got over the loss. "To watch your father go down like that is a hard one."
The result was a harsh streak which affected Coburn profoundly. "His last words were 'Goddammit', which was typical," said Coburn. "I don't think he ever really hugged me once." But, in general, he enjoyed a sunlit, carefree upbringing. He had his own car at 17, a coveted Winfield roadster, and ran around with a cool crew ("Good kids, no assholes").

Coburn drifted into the army after school, where he played the conga drums in a service club band before deciding on a career in acting after his formidable baritone (brought on by a childhood bout of bronchitis) found him doing voiceovers for army training films. His unlikely role model was Mickey Rooney, whom he'd watched repeatedly while working as an usher at the local cinema. His biggest influence, though, was grande dame Stella Adler, under whom he studied in New York at the Stella Adler Studio of Acting.
He blossomed under her flamboyant approach and quoted her maxims for the rest of his life ('Never be boring, darling!').
Thanks to his rangy physique and deep voice, he was soon working steadily on television Westerns such as
Wagon Train and Bonanza. He nearly always played the heavy or the murderer - everything from eyepatch-wearing hicks to waistcoated smoothies - and tended to fare best when he could add a little panache or sarcastic topspin to his lines.
The apotheosis of all this fine-tuned physicality was Coburn's big break as the knife-throwing gunman in The Magnificent Seven in 1960. The set in Mexico was a testosterone-fest of hotshot actors fidgeting with their Stetsons to upstage the star, Yul Brynner. But Coburn went the other way, making a virtue of his minimal dialogue (just 14 terse lines), and embodying a Zen-like stillness instead. He must be the first Western hero to wait for the bad guys by sitting down cross-legged and inspecting a flower.

Coburn's breakthrough into movies was testament to the influence of another powerful and magnetic woman in his life - his first wife, Beverly Kelly. Raised in California, she was an exotic dark-haired beauty with an edgy, potent charm.
Her idea of relaxation was heading off to Tibet to collect Buddhist artefacts. She wore dark robes and a perfume from Cairo called Dragon's Blood. "She had the authority of a high priestess," says Frank Messa, an artist and long-time friend of the Coburns.
Beverly's influence was crucial to Coburn's success. When he was fretting about how to play his part in The Magnificent Seven, it was Beverly who told him simply to emulate the Zen-like poise of the swordsman in the original Seven Samurai.
The couple married in 1959 - down in Mexico by most people's recollection - and Coburn adopted Beverly's young daughter, Lisa, from her first marriage, as his own. "I was always her daddy," he said. A son, James H Coburn IV, known as Jimmy, followed in 1961.
By 1964, with Coburn progressing to bigger movie roles, the couple decided to buy a house to match. It was a sprawling Moroccan mansion in Beverly Hills, where the neighbours included Bill Cosby and Jack Lemmon. Beverly brought in designer Tony Duquette and turned the house into a Swinging Sixties fevered dream of turquoise walls, scarlet bannisters and zebra-skin rugs.

"The house was like an epicentre of the times," remembers Lisa Coburn. "When the guy who wrote Pyramid Power came to visit, they erected a pyramid in the Moroccan Room. I didn't take it too seriously. My mother would host these wild parties with
a whole range of guests - artists, musicians, thinkers. Dad was more laid-back. He loved to play his drums in the stair hallway
[for the acoustics] with his friends, the Gamelan Bang Gang."
Finally, Coburn ascended to leading man stardom with Our Man Flint in 1966 and the sequel, In Like Flint, a year later. Conceived as the American answer to
James Bond films, the movies were unabashed campfests, but not without wit. Master spy Derek Flint boasts a black belt in judo, cohabits with four playmates and can speak in 47 languages, including dolphin. His cigarette lighter has 82 different functions - "83 if you want to light a cigar."
These were the good years for Coburn - a giddy, decade-long whirl of jet-set travel, fast driving, tailored suits, glamorous projects and epochal socialising. When Dennis Hopper threw a wrap party at their house without actually bothering to tell them first, the Coburns simply opened the doors and pressed the kids into service. When the Karmapa of Tibet and his retinue of Buddhist monks came to town, they all stayed at his house. Coburn even took His Holiness for a spin in his red Ferrari along Mulholland Drive, saffron robes trailing.

Coburn experimented with LSD, worked out on his back patio with Bruce Lee, and coughed up a Rolls-Royce, as you do, after losing a game of gin rummy to his wife on a plane. Beverly repaid the courtesy by acquiring a couple of pet monkeys for the household. The monkeys, called Moonbeam and Coco, had their own rope-filled enclosure, but often ran free to add to the house's chaotic anything-goes vibe, even peeing on guests' heads. Moonbeam, the male, liked to jump onto Coburn's back when he and Beverly were having sex. "I was not a fan of the monkeys," says Coburn's son, James IV. "They got all the attention I wanted. My father just wasn't into being Superdad. He was an actor and an artist and had his own agenda to deal with." But Jimmy did get to go to Mexico for the making of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, and appears in the film's river raft sequence. "Look, it was a great life, no question," he says of his father's career. "All the actors he worked with, all the films he did - nothing to complain about.
Location was fun. My dad was good company when his health was good.
We'd go on drives. We had good times, there just weren't that many." Lisa Coburn's memories are more affectionate. She loved running errands with her dad in his Ferrari and to this day runs a specific stop sign in Beverly Hills in his honour. For years, they enjoyed a running joke of her launching surprise Cato-style karate attacks on him. "I thought he was a great dad," she says. "I adored him."
Still, fatherhood remained one area that Coburn felt remiss about in later years. "If I'd had the monkeys before I had kids," he once confessed, "I would have been a better parent."
By contrast, as a professional colleague, Coburn was a paragon of attentive generosity. Katy Haber still keeps a 'Jimmy section' of photos among her career mementoes. "Jimmy was one of the few people that Sam deeply respected and couldn't be rude to. They often caroused together even when they weren't making movies."
Peckinpah, in turn, remained Coburn's favourite director despite his addictive extremes. "I got him off alcohol and immediately he started snorting cocaine!" protested Coburn. Yet it was precisely that unhinged quality - at least when aligned with sufficient sobriety - that produced such vibrant cinema. "Sam was a mad genius," said Coburn. "He would shove you right over into the abyss and sometime he would jump right in after you."
Certainly, Peckinpah inspired what is arguably Coburn's best performance as the world-weary outlaw-turned-sheriff in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. The film remains a woozy mangled masterpiece - even the restored director's cut - but Coburn's performance is a hard, clear and beautiful study in disenchantment and self-disgust. In the film's most poignant scene, a wounded old sheriff (played by Slim Pickens) staggers down to the riverside to die, watched helplessly by his wife. It could so easily be maudlin (the soundtrack is Bob Dylan's 'Knocking on Heaven's Door'), but the effect is heartbreaking, and properly tragic.
Not least because the scene closes on Coburn's haunted expression as he looks on, sensing that his own soul is similarly doomed. Forced to hunt down his old partner, he winds up, in effect, killing himself. From here on, his actions get increasingly sour, and his view of the world hardens into contempt. As Mark Cousins observed, when he interviewed Coburn on an episode of
Scene by Scene in 2000, 'There's nothing sentimental in your work as an actor.'

Steve Saragossi is the author of the first biography of the actor, the upcoming In Like Coburn.
He feels that while Coburn never achieved the superstardom of, say, Paul Newman or Clint Eastwood, he did make the transition from classic Hollywood to the post-studio system era more successfully than most. "A lot of Sixties stars couldn't hack it," says Saragossi. "Your George Peppards, your Rod Taylors, your Tony Curtises. But actors like McQueen and Coburn were just as good in the postmodern anti-heroic mode as they were in the classic strait-laced heroic mould." "If you line up Coburn's roles post-Flint," says Saragossi, "he played more anti-heroes than anyone you can think of: conman, blackmailer, huckster, outlaw, pickpocket, criminal mastermind, IRA terrorist... He ploughed that trough with abandon, more than Clint Eastwood even."
Watching the Coburn canon again, it's easy to see why. His expansive lust-for-life charm, seasoned with a little mocking disdain, was perfectly suited to the rogues and scoundrels that flourished in the Nixon era. That vast equine grin was equal to any criminal setback, it seemed. Sergio Leone's 1971 movie, Duck, You Sucker, is probably the pick of Coburn's non-Peckinpah films, a billowy meditation on revolution and friendship drenched in dreamy torrents of Ennio Morricone. It contains another favourite Coburn moment - when he watches a firing squad from the shadows, rain dripping off his fedora, and the echoed gunshots send him back into his own tragic past. It's sublime screen acting - no dialogue, all close-up - the great-souled hero letting us in.
The Seventies proved to be equally dramatic for Coburn personally. In 1976, Beverly flew out to Greece where Coburn was making Sky Riders only to be confronted by a marital indiscretion that was too close to home. After 17 years together, the strains were beginning to show, and the couple divorced. As with most things in Hollywood in the Seventies, cocaine was also a factor.

"When it came down to the second half of the Seventies, there were a lot more drugs," says James IV frankly. "I don't think my dad wanted to sit around and do drugs. I think my mother did." Turning 50, he settled in a bungalow in Sherman Oaks with a home bar and a couple of snooker tables and embarked on his rebound years. "He never had a problem getting chicks," says James IV. "He had a house in the Valley, he was a movie star, he drove around in a Ferrari. It was a Good. Steady.
Flow. 'You never have to worry about chicks, kiddo,' he'd say.
'There's always another one.'" "He did fine," confirms Lisa. "His choices weren't always so good, but he did fine."
This was the start of a dark time for Coburn. In 1980 he lost his great pal Steve McQueen to cancer and noticed a strange stinging in his wrists which turned out to be rheumatoid arthritis. Within a year the pain was so great, he could barely get out of bed. His father had also suffered from the disease, but Coburn preferred to blame it on the negative emotions stirred up by his divorce. "I was raging inside," he said, "and it turned me to stone." "I remember those days because they were sad in a way," says Messa, who was the closest of Coburn's male friends. "He was hurting and nobody was around. This town, people see someone in his shape and whoosh." "People thought he was dead," says James IV. Instead, Coburn found comfort in his spiritual interests.
When playing drums proved too painful, Messa customised a bamboo flute with a rubber tube so he could still play. It was a particularly cruel irony that this most graceful and physically expressive of actors - Sight and Sound magazine devoted a whole article to his gestures alone - should wind up with his hands so gnarled.
He finally alleviated the disease with an experimental electromagnetic treatment, but when he resumed full-time movie work in 1988, he was mostly confined to B-movies or pallid comedies playing one-note villains. He had a name for such parts: "Guy in a suit... Guy with the briefcase... Guy with the money." Understandably, he succumbed to depression.
What rejuvenated him was meeting Paula Murad, a vivacious broadcaster from Cleveland who was 27 years his junior. They locked eyes at a lambada carnival in 1991, and married two years later in Versailles. En route to the altar, Coburn wooed Paula by taking her to St Tropez where he appeared in an episode of
My Riviera enthusing about modern art. The series' director Michael Feeney Callan found Coburn an expansive raconteur, but detected a hint of curmudgeonly regret beneath the Steve McQueen and Bruce Lee anecdotes. "He was very aware he had come in at the tail end of the golden era. He saw his career in chapters.
Hollywood chapters. And with the rise of the counter culture, he'd fallen off the train, as he put it."
Even if he didn't admit it, Coburn had missed Beverly's shrewd creative guidance. It would be another two years before salvation arrived in the form of writer-director Paul Schrader offering him the role of the abusive patriarch in his adaptation of
Affliction. It was the kind of meaty role Coburn had been seeking for years, but he had to overcome some deep resistance to the part, his friend Sandi Love remembers. "Paul Schrader said to him: 'You're not going to intimidate with your big deep voice.
You're going to speak in a falsetto through rehearsals.' It was tremendous psychology because it forced him to be more fragile. He had to work out the demons that were hiding inside him about his own father - to face the stuff he was scared of."
Affliction was the darkest film he ever made - a schematically bleak family drama about a smalltown sheriff (Nick Nolte) goaded into patricidal fury by his father's unrelenting spite. Coburn had played villains before. In
The Last Hard Men (1975) he let his outlaw gang rape a woman, but that was still high-style stuff - all black leather gloves and buckaroo scarf knots. Here he was bluntly appalling - a taunting overbearing drunk shorn of any charm and flair. Also, he got to be abjectly helpless - unprecedented for him on screen. For the first time, those crooked hands were an asset.
Affliction was released in December 1997 to rave reviews, but Coburn had to be pushed to go out and promote his chances of a Best Supporting Actor Oscar. "He didn't think he had a shot in hell," says Sandi Love. "The closer it got to the Academy Awards, the more cranky he became." But he'd underestimated how well-loved he was among Hollywood folk, and his name was duly announced. "I finally got one right, I guess," he said as he clutched the statue in his gnarled grip. He celebrated in style, getting royally smashed at the after-parties. "He was the only star I knew who didn't have Actor's Disease - that inflated sense of entitlement," said his daughter Lisa. "I was always really proud of him for that."
The Oscar set him up for a gratifying career twilight of interesting roles, dark and light. He got to be in a Pixar movie, voicing the jolly booming villain in Monsters Inc., and even found time to star in a short film by a first-time director simply because he liked the subject. Called The Good Doctor, it was a fictional spin on euthanasia pioneer Dr Kevorkian. Filming took place at director Ken Orkin's house in the Hollywood Hills, literally in the backyard, but the no-budget lack of glamour didn't bother Coburn. "He loved the whole process - just acting and being on a set," says Orkin. "My abiding memory of him is filming on the back deck as the sun went down, when he paused and looked out over the hills and said, 'It doesn't get better than this.'"

Coburn died at home on 18 November 2002 of a heart attack, aged 74. In his final years, he suffered from an enlarged heart and congestive heart failure, and despite doctor's orders, remained something of a rogue bon viveur - grappa, Champagne, dinners at The Palm. But he always seized any opportunity to keep working. "I pushed him around in a wheelchair for half a year," remembers Messa. "I had to watch this man I love deteriorate. But even in his sickest state, he had this huge energy for acting."
Coburn's penultimate film, The Man from Elysian Fields (2001), was playing in cinemas when his death was announced and I took the afternoon off to see it. Mercifully, it was a fitting swan song - a low-budget, heartfelt drama in which he plays a worldly novelist struggling to write his final book before death closes in.
The film is quirky - Mick Jagger pops up as a gigolo - but it is that most agreeable of Hollywood farewell turns - the majestic old lion strutting his stuff.
My own father suffered terribly from arthritis, so I understood what Coburn faced. That day I loved him all the more for not letting the disease diminish his swagger or inhibit his performances. In his later years he always seemed to make an extra effort to wield his prop cigars and tumblers of Scotch with the full Adler-mandated élan. "Stella taught us that without style, without personality, you're just a stick out there," he said.
The Man from Elysian Fields has a couple of love scenes and there is a unexpected grace in the way he runs his weathered fingers over his younger wife's smooth skin, a poignant - and alas prescient - farewell to precious things. Coburn's beloved wife, Paula, would die of cancer just two years after his death.
His first wife, Beverly, lived until 2012 with no diminution of her distinct charisma. "Dahhhling," she would begin every phone call, reclining on her 500-year-old hand-carved Chinese bed, surrounded by Tibetan thangkas.
After the screening of The Man from Elysian Fields, I went and bought a Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid lobby card and wandered down Hollywood Boulevard to see Coburn's star on the Walk of Fame. There was a cluster of fans, quiet but appreciative, but it didn't mute the sting. Then, just as Coburn had once stepped, radiant, out of the north London mist, I walked away quietly into the California sunshine, the glare closing behind me."

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Always liked his acting style.

Great actor.