Wilford Brimley (1934- ) is a well-known actor to many due to several top-shelf film roles, starring roles in several television series, and a ubiquitous series of television advertisements for Quaker Oats. His grandfatherly appearance, simple demeanor, and deceptively simplistic acting style have ingrained him into American pop culture. He is surprisingly young; in fact, during his years of peak popularity in the late 1980s, he was only in his mid-50's.
Wilford was born in 1934 in Salt Lake City, Utah. He was raised on a ranch in Utah and wound up running the ranch when he came of age. As the years wore on and he approached middle age, Brimley began to gain weight, and so he entrusted the family ranch to his children and took up blacksmithing, a longtime hobby of his. He also became friends with actor Robert Duvall in the 1960s, because Brimley would often serve as an extra in various spaghetti westerns that were popular at the time; Duvall encouraged him to get into acting and also arranged a few minor speaking parts for Brimley in some western films. Acting on this advice, Brimley became very active in a volunteer theater group and made a few television appearances in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, most notably as the recurring character Horace Brimley, a blacksmith on the show The Waltons.
Due to the success of his regular appearances on The Waltons, a member of the cast of that hit show invited Brimley to join a noted Los Angeles theater group, the Los Angeles Actors Theater. In 1978, he caught what would be his big break, the role of Ted Spindler in the 1979 film The China Syndrome.
As a result of the success of The China Syndrome, Brimley went on to appear in several film projects throughout the early 1980s, culminating in 1984 with his appearance as Robert Redford's baseball manager in the film The Natural and scoring again in 1985 with another major film success, the movie Cocoon. This spurred his career again, allowing him to become the main star and focus of the television series Our House, which ran on NBC during the late 1980s. Star Wars fans (one in particular) might be interested to know that he starred as Noa in the second Ewok made-for-television movie, Ewoks: The Battle for Endor.
After Our House ended, Brimley stayed in the spotlight by starring in a long running series of Quaker Oats television and print ads, which ran for roughly six years in the United States from the late 1980s to the mid 1990s. In these ads, he would try to pitch the product by talking to children and younger people, telling them that "Quaker Oats is the right thing to do and the tasty way to do it." This, along with a memorable role in the 1993 hit film The Firm as an elderly company watchdog, continued to keep Brimley in the public eye.
He has appeared in dozens of films over the years, often reprising a similar role to his first major break, where he played a simple worker caught in the cogs of something much bigger than himself. He plays the "simple man" exceptionally well; this is perhaps the reason why this otherwise ordinary-seeming elderly gentleman has remained quite visible over the last twenty years. He is still quite active and pops up regularly in films in various supporting roles.
Interestingly, Brimley made the news in 2000 because of his public support of cockfighting, a rather surprising stance that received quite a lot of media attention. He publicly disagreed with Arizona's Proposition 201, which passed regardless of his public protest. Wilford Brimley thinks banning cockfighting isn't the right thing to do. Brimley argued that the passage of this bill could lead to more laws restricting use of animals, like prohibiting the use of dogs for hunting. "My saddle horses are my friends," he said at a press conference. "My dogs are my friends. Once an idea like this gets started, I don't know where it's going to end."
Wilford Brimley, a mild-mannered farmer with a gift for playing the simple man on stage and on screen, leaves behind a legacy of supporting roles in a wide variety of films and a face immediately recognizable to anyone who watched television in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Yes, even given his many film roles, some of them quite notable, Wilford Brimley is still most recognizable to the average person as the "Quaker Oats" guy.
Lucy-S says Let's not forget Brimley's memorable role as the deranged, ax-wielding, alien-infected Dr. Blair in John Carpenter's 1982 horror opus "The Thing". Oatmeal never quite looked the same to me after seeing that movie ....