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Bill Cobbs, a veteran actor who amassed nearly 200 credits over a five-decade career — including roles in The Bodyguard and Night at the Museum — has died at 90.
He died “peacefully” Tuesday evening at his home in Riverside, California, his brother Thomas G. Cobbs confirmed. His publicist, Chuck E. Jones, told The Associated Press that natural causes were the likely cause of death.
Cobbs’ brother remembers him as a “beloved partner, big brother, uncle, surrogate parent, godfather and friend.”
“Bill recently and happily celebrated his 90th birthday surrounded by loved ones,” he wrote. “As a family, we are comforted to know that Bill has found peace and eternal rest with his Heavenly Father. We ask for your prayers and encouragement during this time.”
Born in Cleveland, Cobbs appeared in films such as the Coen brothers’ The Hudsucker Proxy, as Whitney Houston’s manager in The Bodyguard, Martin Scorsese’s 1986 sports drama The Color of Money, Demolition Man, the coach in Air Bud, and the security guard in Night at the Museum. He made his first big screen appearance in a cameo role in 1974’s The Taking of Pelham One Two Three.
“All our friends and neighbors went to see the movie and they were all waiting for me to show up,” Cobbs recalled in 2013 interview. “I walk up to a police officer on the subway and say, ‘Hey, man. What’s happening?'”
He became a lifelong actor with about 200 film and television roles. The lion’s share of them came in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, when directors and television producers turned to him again and again to imbue small but pivotal roles with a withered and exhausted soulfulness.
In 2020, he won a Daytime Emmy for his role as Mr. Hendrickson in Dino Dana, a Canadian children’s educational show.
Cobbs has appeared in television shows including The Sopranos, The West Wing, The Equalizer, Six Feet Under, Street sezam and Good Times.
Cobbs rarely gets such big, award-winning roles. Instead, Cobbs was a familiar and memorable figure who left an impression on audiences regardless of his screen time. He won a Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Limited Performance in a Daytime Program for the series Dino Dana in 2020.
Wendell Pierce, who co-starred with Cobbs in Gonna Fly Away and The Gregory Hines Show, remembered Cobbs as “a father figure, a griot, an iconic entertainer who also made his living as an actor,” he wrote on Twitter/X .
Wilbert Francisco Cobbs, born June 16, 1934, served eight years in the United States Air Force after graduating from Cleveland High School. In the years after his service, Cobbs sold cars. One day a client asked him if he wanted to act in a play. Cobbs first appeared on the stage in 1969. He began acting in theater in Cleveland and later moved to New York, where he joined the Negro Ensemble Company, playing alongside Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee.
Cobbs later said that acting resonated with him as a way to express the human condition, especially during the civil rights movement of the late 1960s.
“To be an artist, you have to have a sense of giving,” Cobbs said in a 2004 interview. “Art is kind of a prayer, isn’t it? We react to what we see around us and what we feel and how things affect us mentally and spiritually.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report
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