J.D. Cannon

The Face of Weary Authority

John Donovan Cannon was born in Idaho in 1922, but his true home was the pavement of New York. He joined the Actors Studio when Stanislavski's technique was still a risky experiment for many Broadway producers. There he shared space with guys who would change movies forever.

Unlike his classmates, he didn't go after the tormented leading-man roles. Cannon soon realized his look worked best as the serious counterpoint to the star of the moment. He had the gaze of someone who has seen it all and expects nothing good from humanity.

He lived with an expression of absolute severity.

In 1970, he landed the role that would keep him working for nearly a decade. Playing Chief Peter B. Clifford in McCloud meant being perpetually irritated by a New Mexico sheriff in the middle of Manhattan. The show worked because Cannon knew how to be the wall that Dennis Weaver's charisma crashed against.

But reducing his career to a police office would be a huge mistake. The actor had already honed his craft on stage and in brief appearances in The Fugitive and The Untouchables. And always with the restraint that only great supporting actors allow themselves.

He never needed to shout for the audience to know who was in charge of the scene.

From Prison Yard to Outer Space

In 1967, he appeared in one of the most important films of the decade. In Cool Hand Luke, he played Society Red and proved he could hold his own in an acting duel with Paul Newman. On that shoot, Cannon brought the gritty realism needed to make the prison feel suffocating.

And he did it without breaking a sweat.

Cannon was a method actor who didn't seem like one. He worked on the pilot episode of Star Trek, titled The Menagerie, in 1966, and years later he stepped into the shoes of an investigator in Cotton Comes to Harlem. He moved from science fiction to exploitation cinema with astonishing ease.

So casting directors always had him in mind for those hard-edged lawman roles. In 1971, he starred in Lawman under director Michael Winner. There he shared the screen with Burt Lancaster and Robert Ryan without ever letting the intensity drop.

He was valued for his ability to look dangerous in a trench coat.

Even as the big studio film industry began to change in the 1980s, he kept his standing. In 1980, he joined the cast of Raise the Titanic and kept landing one television job after another. The size of the project never mattered to him as long as the character had a minimum of professional dignity.

His last credited appearance was in an episode of Law & Order that aired in 1991. In it, he played a character named Jerome Kamen, closing a decades-long chapter of playing men who knew the ins and outs of the American justice system. He stepped away from the noise of film sets to live in the quiet of Hudson.

He died on May 20, 2005, at the age of 83 from natural causes.