Bill Cobbs, the likable character actor who starred in important roles in movies including Sunshine State, Night at the Museum, and The Hudsucker Proxy, has passed away. He was ninety years old.
Cobbs passed away at his Riverside home on Tuesday night from natural causes, according to his publicist Chuck I. Jones, who spoke with The Hollywood Reporter.
Cobbs, a Cleveland native who was gifted in both comedy and drama, played the manager of Whitney Houston in The Bodyguard (1992), Medgar Evers’ older brother in Rob Reiner’s Ghosts of Mississippi (1996), a jazz pianist in Tom Hanks’ That Thing You Do! (1996), and the Master Tinker, who constructed the Tin Woodsman, in Sam Raimi’s Oz the Great and Powerful (2013).
In Air Bud (1997), he also portrayed the astute coach who started a dog that could play basketball in the Timberwolves lineup.
Cobbs was well-known for his roles in television, including The Dutchman, the sardonic bartender on the Dabney Coleman-starring The Slap Maxwell Story, Tony the bus driver on The Drew Carey Show, the father of the title character on The Gregory Hines Show, and Dr. Emory Erickson, the Transporter’s inventor, on Star Trek: Enterprise.
Cobbs played Moses, the mysterious clock man whose power to freeze time arrives not a minute too soon for Tim Robbins’ Norville Barnes in the Coen brothers’ 1994 film The Hudsucker Proxy.
Cobbs serves as a moral compass in Sunshine State (2002), directed by John Sayles, as a physician fighting to save his beachfront community in Florida from being developed. (Previously, the actor and director collaborated in the science fiction comedy The Brother From Another Planet in 1984.)
In the 2006 film Night at the Museum, Cobbs played the security officer Reginald, who was about to retire. He reappeared in the 2014 follow-up.
On June 16, 1934, Wilbert Francisco Cobbs was born. He spent eight years in the U.S. Air Force after graduating from Cleveland’s East Tech High School, where he dabbled with stand-up comedy. Before making his theatrical debut in the anti-apartheid musical Lost in the Stars at Karamu House in his hometown in 1969, he sold automobiles and worked for IBM.
Soon after, he played parts in the famous Cleveland theater productions of Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author and Ossie Davis’ Purlie.
A year later, Cobbs moved to the East and became a member of the Negro Ensemble Company in New York, where he collaborated with artists such as Davis, Ruby Dee, Adolph Caesar, and Moses Gunn. He remembered in 2015, “I thought maybe I could be an actor once I realized I could walk on the stage with people like that.”
Cobbs had appearances off Broadway in Ride a Black Horse in 1971 and Black Visions for the Joseph Papp Public Theater, costarring with Caesar and Esther Rolle.
He made his big-screen debut in The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974), appearing on a subway platform.
In 2013, he said, “I went back home to see my parents, and everyone was waiting for my appearance.” All of our friends and neighbors had gone to watch the movie. “In the metro, I approach a police officer and say, ‘Hey, guy. “What’s happening?”
In 1975, he did understudies for Broadway productions of The First Breeze of Summer and Black Picture Show.
A Mighty Wind (2003), Three Days to Vegas (2007), Get Low (2009), The Muppets (2011), Greased Lightning (1977), Trading Places (1983), The Cotton Club (1984), The Color of Money (1986), New Jack City (1991), The Hard Way (1991), The People Under the Stairs (1991), Demolition Man (1993), Hope Floats (1998), The Hard Way (1991), Demolition Man (1993), and Things to Do in Denver When You’re Dead (1995) were among the other films on Cobbs’ reel.
Cobbs has often appeared in guest roles on a variety of television shows, including The Equalizer, Kate & Allie, The Sopranos, Yes, Dear, and Sam Waterston’s I’ll Fly Away, The Michael Richards Show, Julianne Nicholson’s The Others, and Matthew Perry’s Go On.
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