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Wilford Brimley, best known for his roles in “The Natural,” the 1982 remake of “The Thing,” “The Firm” and “Cocoon,” died on Saturday. He was 85.

His agent, Lynda Bensky, told The New York Times that he had been sick with a kidney problem for two months.

Brimley was also famous for the series of commercials for Quaker Oats in which he appeared.

Pauline Kael ably summed up his appeal in a few words. Reviewing “Cocoon” for the New Yorker in 1985, she said, “Wilford Brimley, with his walrus mustache and friendly belly, brings an ornery impudence to his role.”

Brimley, who seemed to enter old age several decades ago, appeared perfectly at home in the Ron Howard-directed movie about senior citizens unintentionally rejuvenated by an alien life force in the pool where they do water aerobics even though he was only 51 at the time. Brimley’s Ben Luckett doing cannonballs in...

Character actor Wilford Brimley, whose myriad credits include TV’s The Waltons and Our House and the movie Cocoon, has died at the age of 85.

According to TMZ, Brimley passed away in his Utah home on Saturday morning. He had recently spent days in an ICU hospital unit on dialysis.

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Brimley’s breakthrough role came...

Actor Robert Conrad, the star of television series including “Hawaiian Eye,” “The Wild Wild West” and “Baa Baa Black Sheep” during an almost five-decade career that also included the occasional feature film, has died in Malibu, Calif. He was 84.

Conrad toplined at least one series in the 1950s, ’60s, ’70s, ’80s and ’90s, a rare feat of longevity for a TV star.

He made his debut playing a pilot in the 1958 film “Thundering Jets” and would go on to make credited appearances in some 15 features, making the biggest impression in 1975 heist pic “Murph the Surf” and playing John Dillinger in 1979’s “The Lady in Red.” But Conrad was a far bigger presence in television.

In 1959 Conrad signed a contract with Warner Bros., and the studio cast the young actor, with Anthony Eisley, in the Honolulu-set detective show “Hawaiian Eye,” which ran from 1959-63. Conrad played the half-Hawaiian P.I. Tom...