The veteran character actor and opera singer died after a battle with cancer.
Actor Robert Swan, known for roles in the likes of Hoosiers, Natural Born Killers and The Untouchables, has died, aged 78.
His friend Betty Hoeffner confirmed to The Hollywood Reporter that the actor had died at his home in Rolling Prairie, Indiana, following a long battle with liver cancer.
Swan appeared alongside Gene Hackman in 1986 sports film Hoosiers, in which he played Indiana farmer Rollin Butcher, who had two sons in the high school basketball team Hackman’s character is sent in to coach.
Butcher is one of the few townies who welcomes him, going on to join him on the bench as an assistant.
Swan’s role in Hoosiers sparked a sports movie stint, including in Arthur Hiller’s 1992 baseball biopic The Babe starring John Goodman. Swan played the father of New York Yankees slugger George Herman Ruth before going on to play a priest in 1993 underdog sports classic Rudy, led by a young Sean Astin.
The veteran character actor also played his fair share of lawmen, from a Canadian Mountie in Brian De Palma’s The Untouchables, which earned Sean Connery his only Academy Award, to a deputy in Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers. He also played detectives in Who’s That Girl? (1987) and Mo’ Money (1992).
Swan was a Chicago native, and his career expands beyond the big screen, working on TV in 1984’s The Dollmaker alongside Jane Fonda and in a series of shows including All My Children, Spenser: For Hire, Missing Persons and a one-episode arc in the original Equalizer series.
Swan was also a known face in Chicago theatre before making it to Broadway in 1974 with The Freedom of the City.
In addition to acting, he was a talented opera singer, performing at the Church of St Paul & the Redeemer in Hyde Park as a youngster and with the chorus at the Lyric Opera Orchestra. Swan went on to found and perform at the Harbor Country Opera in Three Oaks, Michigan.
At the time of his death, he working on developing his screenplay, The Saint and the Scoundrel, about English lexicographer Samuel Johnson, who is credited with creating the first modern English language dictionary in the 1700s and who suffered from Tourette’s syndrome.
A celebration of life at a date to be announced will feature a reading of the screenplay featuring Hill Street Blues star Daniel J Travanti as Johnson, Si Osborne as his biographer and an actor to be named as the narrator, a role Swan dreamed of portraying.