"His cause of death hasn't been confirmed."

The BBC were saying yesterday that it was natural causes, whatever that means. But yeah, no doubt we'll find out more in the fullness of time.

Well, obviously because sometimes it's not known at that time (pending an autopsy perhaps). Or there might be legal reasons for withholding information. Or it's simply none of the public's business.

The Grim Reaper keeps on swinging the scythe....

RIP to actor Bo Hopkins...



Hopkins was a character actor, from Greenville, SC. He was adopted at the age of 9 months, to a couple who could not conceive. His adoptive father died at the age of 39, of a heart attack that he and his mother witnessed. They were forced to move in with grandparents, until his mother remarried. He did not get along with his stepfather and went through a tumultuous period, before leaving to live with his grandfather. He was in and out of trouble, as a youth and dropped out of school and enlisted in the US Army, at 17. He served with the 101st Airborne, and served 9 months in Korea. After his Army stint, and while married with a daughter, he caught the acting bug, which caused his wife to leave him, with their child. he earned a scholarship to the Pioneer Playhouse, in Danville, KY, whose alumni included Lee Majors, Jim Varney and John Travolta. he honed his acting skills, before moving to New York to do more theater, then Hollywood, where he studied at The Actor's Studio, alongside Martin Landau.

Hopkins started getting roles, in the late 60s, including an episode of the Andy Griffith Show and the war movies The Bridge at Remagen and The Thousand Plane Raid. He had a very high profile career, in the 70s, appearing in numerous tv shows and movies, including The Moonshine War, Cat Ballou, Monte Walsh, The Getaway, The Wild Bunch, White Lightning and American Graffiti, where he plays Joe, the leader of the Pharaohs (well, of the small bunch of them) who accost Richard Dreyfus, as he sits on their car, watching a tv in a store window. He would return for More American Graffiti, where he appears in the Vietnam sections, serving alongside Terry the Toad (Charles Martin Smith) as door gunner on a Huey.

On TV, aside from Andy Griffith, he appeared in Gunsmoke, The Wild Wild West, Rat Patrol, Bonanza, The Mod Squad, Hawaii 5-0, Doc Elliot (as a series regular), The Rookies, Barnaby Jones, The Rockford Files, the mini-series Aspen, Charlie's Angels and The A-Team.

His IMDB credit list has 131 entries, with the last in 2020, in Hillbilly Elegy.

Hopkins was great in everything, an actor's actor, making every part, no matter how small, meaningful and memorable.





I guess someone in the Great Beyond wanted to join the Pharaohs.

Still not sure about the blood initiation, though...

Seeing lots of stuff on Twitter. The most “definitive” source seems to be a site called ultimateclassicrock.com .

So iconic, I've stared at these covers (on vinyl back in the day especially) so many times growing up:

Used to have a colelction of some of his fantasy art, with much of it from the work he did for Robert Adams' Horseclans series.....







He also did the cover to this awesome G-8 paperback reprint....



and a nifty Solomon Kane.....



His covers were one of the reasons I gave the Horseclans series a try.  It started out as a decent little series, then probably peaked with the Bili the Axe books, then just kind of repeated itself and stagnated.  It was a cool idea, of a post-apocalyptic future, which reverted to a medieval state, apart from an enclave of scientists at Cape Canaveral.  A few of the characters were immortal, especially Milo Morai, whose memories only extended back to WW2, after waking up from a mugging, and eventually discovering a group of kids and some genetically modified cats (engineered to reintroduce sabre-tooth tigers) and cared for them as nomads, who then returned to civilization and started conquering territories, some of which had been conquered by Greek expatriots.  It was a convulted thing and Adams never fully aid things out; plus, he had a few odd ideas in there (like a pair of incestuous siblings, where he argues that there was nothing inherently wrong, from a biological standpoint, which is all kinds of F-ed up).