NEW YORK — Bill Cobbs, a veteran character actor who became a ubiquitous and wise screen presence as an older man, has died. He was 90.
Cobbs died Tuesday at his home in Inland Empire, California, surrounded by family and friends, his publicist, Chuck I. Jones, said. The probable cause of death was natural, Jones said.
A Cleveland native, Cobbs starred in such films as “The Hudsucker Proxy,” “The Bodyguard” and “Night at the Museum.” He made his first big-screen appearance in a fleeting role in 1974’s “The Taking of Pelham One Two Three.” He became a lifelong actor with nearly 200 film and TV credits. Most of them came in the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s, when filmmakers and TV producers repeatedly turned to him to play small but important characters with an aging and grizzled soulfulness.
Cobbs appeared in such television shows as “The Sopranos,” “The West Wing,” “Sesame Street” and “Good Times.” He was Whitney Houston’s manager in “The Bodyguard,” the mysterious watchman in the Coen brothers’ “The Hudsucker Proxy” and the doctor in John Sayles’ “Sunshine State.” He also played a coach in “Air Bud,” a security guard in “Night at the Museum” and a father on “The Gregory Hines Show.”
Cobbs rarely got the kind of lead roles that stood out and won awards. Instead, Cobbs was a familiar and memorable common man who left an impression on audiences regardless of screen time. He won a Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Limited Performance in a Daytime Program in 2020 for the series “Dino Dana.”
Wendell Pierce, who starred alongside Cobbs in “I’ll Fly Away” and “The Gregory Hines Show,” remembered Cobbs as “a father figure, a musician, an iconic artist who I know a lot about as an actor by the way he lived his life,” he wrote on the social media platform X.
Born on June 16, 1934, Wilbert Francisco Cobbs served in the US Air Force for eight years after graduating from high school in Cleveland. In the years following his service, Cobbs sold cars. One day, a customer asked him if he wanted to act in a play. Cobbs first appeared on stage in 1969. He began acting in the Cleveland Theater and later moved to New York where he joined the Negro Ensemble Company, where he performed alongside Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee.
Cobbs later said that acting was a way to express the human condition, especially during the civil rights movement of the late 60s, during which she took up acting.
“To be an artist, you have to have a giving spirit,” Cobbs said in a 2004 interview. “Art is a bit like prayer, isn’t it? We respond to what we see and feel around us and how things affect us mentally and spiritually.”
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