Bill Cobbs, the character actor who became a ubiquitous and wise screen presence as an older man, has died. He was 90 years old.
Cobbs died Tuesday at his home in Inland Empire, California, surrounded by family and friends, said his publicist Chuck I. Jones. His death was likely due to natural causes, Jones said.
A Cleveland native, Cobbs starred in films such as “The Hudsucker Proxy,” “The Bodyguard” and “Night at the Museum.” He made his first appearance on the big screen in a fleeting role in 1974’s “The Taking of Pelham One, Two Three.”
In his career he accumulated nearly 200 film and television credits, most of them after he turned 50, when filmmakers and television producers turned to him again and again for small but pivotal roles.
Cobbs appeared on television shows such as “The Sopranos,” “The West Wing,” “Sesame Street” and “Good Times.” He was Whitney Houston’s manager in “The Bodyguard” (1992), the mystical watchmaker in the Coen brothers’ “The Hudsucker Proxy” (1994) and the doctor in John Sayles’ “Sunshine State” 2002. He played the coach in “Air Bud” (1997), the security guard in “Night at the Museum” (2006) and the father in “The Gregory Hines Show.”
Cobbs rarely got the kind of roles that break out and win awards. Instead, he was a familiar yet memorable man who left an impression on audiences regardless of the time he spent in front of the screen. He won a Daytime Emmy Award for his outstanding limited performance in the series “Dino Dana” in 2020.
Wendell Pierce, who starred alongside Cobbs in “I’ll Fly Away” and “The Gregory Hines Show,” remembered Cobbs as “a father figure, a griot (West African storyteller), an iconic artist who called me attention for the way he led his life as an actor,” he wrote on social media platform X.
Wilbert Francisco Cobbs, born June 16, 1934, served eight years in the United States Air Force after graduating from high school in Cleveland. In the years after his service, Cobbs sold cars. One day, a client asked him if he wanted to act in a play. Cobbs first appeared on stage in 1969. He began performing in the Cleveland theater and later moved to New York, where he joined the Negro Ensemble Company, performing alongside Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee.
Cobbs later said that the performance resonated with him as a way to express the human condition, particularly during the Civil Rights Movement in the late 1960s.
“To be an artist, you have to have a sense of generosity,” Cobbs said in a 2004 interview. “Art is kind of like a prayer, right? We respond to what we see around us and what we feel and how things affect us mentally and spiritually.”
