JAMES Coburn, who played the tough guy in films such as Magnificent Seven, The (1960) and finally won an Oscar as an abusive father in Affliction (1997), died on Tuesday.
Coburn, 74, suffered a heart attack while listening to music with his wife at home in Los Angeles.

"He died happy," said manager Hillard Elkins.

Coburn won the Academy Award for best supporting actor in 1999 after overcoming a 10-year struggle with arthritis that left one hand crippled.

Despite the earlier physical problems he had been upbeat and working regularly, said Elkins.

Most recently, he appeared in the film The Man From Elysian Fields and finished another called American Gun.

Born in Laurel, Nebraska, on August 31, 1928, Coburn made his movie debut in Ride Lonesome in 1959, following it with another Western, Face of a Fugitive, the same year.

He caught the public's attention the following year, when he played knife-throwing Britt in the epic Magnificent Seven, The (1960).

Although he had few lines compared with his other macho co-stars, who included Yul Brynner, Eli Wallach and Steve McQueen, Coburn's mere screen presence grabbed the public's attention.

"He was a guy who looked like he was casual, but he studied and he worked and he understood character," Elkins said of Coburn's success.

"He was a hell of an actor. He had a great sense of humour and those performances will be remembered."

After The Magnificent Seven, Coburn played sidekicks and villains until the late 1960s when he cashed in on the James Bond mania with the spy spoofs Our Man Flint and In Like Flint.

Then followed The President's Analyst, which he also produced, the World War II escape epic The Great Escape and Goldengirl.

In the 1980s he all but disappeared from the screen with the onset of arthritis. Coburn said he healed himself with pills that had a sulphur base.

His knuckles remained gnarled but he said in 1999 that the pain was gone.

He said then, when the film roles weren't coming, "I've been reading a lot of stuff. I want to go to work. It's what I do best; it's the only thing I can really do.

"Actors are boring when they're not working. It's a natural condition because they don't have anything to do; they just lay around and that's why so many of them get drunk.

"They really get to be boring people. My wife will attest to that," he added with a hearty laugh.

Finally able to work again, he capped his career with an Oscar for a supporting role.

He portrayed the abusive father to Nick Nolte's cop character in Affliction.

It was his only Oscar nomination, and it came after about 80 films.

"Some of them you do for money, some of them you do for love," he said in his acceptance speech.

"This is a love child."

Herald Sun

Source: Press Release