The Hollywood Reporter<\/a> that the actor had died at his home in Rolling Prairie, Indiana, following a long battle with liver cancer.<\/p>\nSwan 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\u2019s character is sent in to coach.<\/p>\n
Butcher is one of the few townies who welcomes him, going on to join him on the bench as an assistant.<\/p>\n
Swan\u2019s role in Hoosiers sparked a sports movie stint, including in Arthur Hiller\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
The veteran character actor also played his fair share of lawmen, from a Canadian Mountie in Brian De Palma\u2019s The Untouchables, which earned Sean Connery his only Academy Award, to a deputy in Oliver Stone\u2019s Natural Born Killers. He also played detectives in Who\u2019s That Girl? (1987) and Mo\u2019 Money (1992).<\/p>\n
Swan was a Chicago native, and his career expands beyond the big screen, working on TV in 1984\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
Swan was also a known face in Chicago theatre before making it to Broadway in 1974 with The Freedom of the City.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s syndrome.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p> <\/body><\/html>\n
","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The veteran character actor and opera singer died after a battle with cancer. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":24,"featured_media":35603,"template":"","categories":[1],"acf":[],"uagb_featured_image_src":{"full":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/56\/2023\/08\/natural-born-killers-and-hoosiers-actor-robert-swan-dies-aged-78-scaled.jpg",2560,1707,false],"thumbnail":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/56\/2023\/08\/natural-born-killers-and-hoosiers-actor-robert-swan-dies-aged-78-150x150.jpg",150,150,true],"medium":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/56\/2023\/08\/natural-born-killers-and-hoosiers-actor-robert-swan-dies-aged-78-300x200.jpg",300,200,true],"medium_large":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/56\/2023\/08\/natural-born-killers-and-hoosiers-actor-robert-swan-dies-aged-78-768x512.jpg",768,512,true],"large":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/56\/2023\/08\/natural-born-killers-and-hoosiers-actor-robert-swan-dies-aged-78-1024x683.jpg",800,534,true],"1536x1536":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/56\/2023\/08\/natural-born-killers-and-hoosiers-actor-robert-swan-dies-aged-78-1536x1024.jpg",1536,1024,true],"2048x2048":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/56\/2023\/08\/natural-born-killers-and-hoosiers-actor-robert-swan-dies-aged-78-2048x1365.jpg",2048,1365,true]},"uagb_author_info":{"display_name":"importmanagerhub@sprylab.com","author_link":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/radiotimes\/author\/importmanagerhubsprylab-com\/"},"uagb_comment_info":0,"uagb_excerpt":"The veteran character actor and opera singer died after a battle with cancer.","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/radiotimes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rss_feed\/35602"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/radiotimes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rss_feed"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/radiotimes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/rss_feed"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/radiotimes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/24"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/radiotimes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35603"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/radiotimes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35602"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/radiotimes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35602"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}