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.
Aside from acting in films, Jones also produced and directed several B-movies, one of which, A Boy and His Dog (1975) is a cult science fiction gem. Based on the Harlan Ellison story of the same name, it is set in a post-apocalyptic landscape through which the main character, Vic, played by Don Johnson, wanders around with a dog more intelligent than he is. On top of his directing duties Jones wrote the screenplay when Ellison was struck with writer’s block, and the outcome was both Peckinpah-brutal and Ellison-entertaining. Later the Australian filmmaker George Miller said A Boy and His Dog had been a major influence on his decision to make Mad Max.
Jones was born Justus McQueen Jr in Beaumont, Texas, where his father was a railway worker. His mother, Jessie (nee Stephens), was killed in a car accident when he was a boy, and as a result he was largely raised by relatives. He joined the navy out of high school in 1945 and returned from service to study at two junior colleges before enrolling at the University of Texas.
After university he was trying to set himself up as a rancher when he got a letter from an old college roommate, Fess Parker, who had just landed a film role in Battle Cry (1955), directed by Raoul Walsh, and reckoned that Jones might be able to get a part in the movie too. Finding the studio using a hand-drawn map that Parker had enclosed in his letter, he somehow crashed the set and convinced Walsh, who had given John Wayne his first movie part, to hire him to play the joker in the Marines outfit that is the movie’s subject. His character’s name was LQ Jones, and he liked the role so much that he adopted that as his screen name.
His next film was Target Zero (1955), in which he spent most of his screen time lugging a wounded Martin over his shoulder. “Wherever possible I’d point his butt at the camera, not his face. After the film we gave him a small statuette we dubbed the Asscar.”
He played in a series of good war movies, particularly Anthony Mann’s Men In War (1957) and Walsh’s The Naked And The Dead (1958), but he was also making a name in westerns. If you turned on a TV in 50s America, you would see a western, and you would often see Jones in it. He was cast as Clint Walker’s sidekick in Cheyenne, the first hour-long prime-time western, but got written out after only three episodes. His continuing part in The Virginian (1962-71) lasted longer: 25 episodes over eight seasons. But he was often called on to play different parts in multiple episodes of series; eight times in Laramie, four on Gunsmoke, Rawhide and The Big Valley, as well as three on the non-western Lassie.
His first western movie was Elvis Presley’s Love Me Tender (1956); he worked with Presley again in Flaming Star (1960) and the rodeo tale Stay Away Joe (1968). His second western was Budd Boetticher’s Buchanan Rides Alone (1958), starring Randolph Scott, and Mann cast him in Cimarron (1960).
In 1961 he played in the short-lived TV series Klondike, which Peckinpah co-directed. This led to his first movie with the director, Ride the High Country (1962), in which he and Oates play two of the Hammond brothers, who face Joel McCrea and Scott in the final shootout. “Joel was the best human being I ever met,” Jones recalled. “And Randy wasn’t far behind.” His verdict on the director was more nuanced. “Sam was a genius and I loved him but he was a basket case.”
He moved into producing in 1964, with a modern western set around an oil well, The Devil’s Bedroom. He led up to A Boy and His Dog with two horror films, as executive producer of The Witchmaker (1969) while writing and starring alongside Martin in The Brotherhood of Satan (1971).
Although no big parts blossomed for him, he remained a busy actor in action pictures such as White Line Fever (1975) and Mother, Jugs & Speed (1976). In 1983 he played the sheriff in the low-budget Dallas rip-off series The Yellow Rose, starring David Soul and Cybill Shepherd; he was in the syndicated series Renegade for two seasons between 1994 and 1996.
By this time, however, he was getting good parts in bigger pictures: especially as the Clark county commissioner Pat Webb in Martin Scorsese’s Casino (1995), but also in Edge (1997), with Anthony Hopkins, and The Patriot and The Mask of Zorro (both 1998). His final film role came in Robert Altman’s A Prairie Home Companion (2006), as a dying man for whom Virginia Madsen’s angel comes.
Jones married his college sweetheart, Sue Lewis, in 1950; they divorced in 1973. He is survived by their three children, Randy, Steve and Mindy.
• LQ Jones (Justus Ellis McQueen Jr), actor, born 9 August 1927; died 9 July 2022
