A big man with a voice built for giving orders, Claude Akins spent four decades being cast as the heavy or the lawman, and he knew exactly why. He was good at both. The parts that might have shown more of him went to other men.
Fi1m perspective
Aldo, the gorilla general of Battle for the Planet of the Apes (1973), stands up in council under a rubber mask, bellows that apes should rule, and is told to sit down. That is the shape of a great deal of Claude Akins's screen work: the biggest man in the scene, the loudest voice, and somebody else with the last word. It is a thankless part in a film with the money gone, and we felt, watching it, a small irritation on his behalf. Here was a man built for exactly this kind of part, in a film that wanted him only to shout and be overruled.
The career before it was steadier and better than that. He first appeared, uncredited, in From Here to Eternity (1953), and then settled into Westerns and war films through the fifties and sixties: Mack in The Defiant Ones (1958), Joe Burdette in Rio Bravo (1959), the Reverend Jeremiah Brown in Inherit the Wind (1960), Sergeant Kolowicz in Merrill's Marauders (1962), where even Sam Fuller singled him out. He made three films with John Wayne. He was what a producer reached for when a scene needed a threat or a badge, and the broad shoulders, the boom and the craggy face did the first half of the work before he opened his mouth.
The turn came on television. As Sonny Pruitt in Movin' On (1974–1976) and then Sheriff Elroy P. Lobo in The Misadventures of Sheriff Lobo (1979–1981) he was finally the lead, and the same build that read as danger in a saloon read as authority in a series. A programme needs someone the audience will trust week after week, and by then he had been trusted, or feared, on screen for twenty years.
He did not enjoy the typecasting, and he said so. "A guy who looks like Robert Redford will most often be cast as a hero. A guy like me or Ernie Borgnine plays a lot of heavies. If you're big, they think you're tough. And if you're tough, they think you're dumb." He lost Dragline in Cool Hand Luke (1967), and it plainly rankled; he described feeling an outsider in Hollywood even while working constantly. The complaint is fair. What he had was best used in ensembles, where a supporting man with weight is worth more than another face in the middle, and the ensembles are where his good notices came from.
If you want him at his most characteristic, look for the Westerns. If you want to see what the business did with him when it was not paying attention, Battle will show you. Nobody who watched Aldo thought he was dumb. They simply never asked him to be anything else.
Biography
Claude Akins was an American character actor. He was born on 25 May 1926 in Nelson, Georgia, and died on 27 January 1994 in Altadena, California.
Akins trained at Northwestern University after serving in the US Army Signal Corps during the Second World War. He appeared in numerous films and television series from the 1950s onwards, including From Here to Eternity (1953), The Caine Mutiny (1954), The Defiant Ones (1958), Rio Bravo (1959) as Joe Burdette, Inherit the Wind (1960), How the West Was Won (1962), Battle for the Planet of the Apes (1973) as Aldo, and The Twilight Zone (1959) as Steve Brand. On television he played recurring roles in series such as Bonanza, Murder, She Wrote and The Misadventures of Sheriff Lobo.
