Strother Martin, born in Kokomo, Indiana, in 1919, was an American character actor whose weathered voice and slippery smile made him a fixture of 1960s and 1970s westerns. He delivered the iconic line about failure to communicate as the prison captain in Cool Hand Luke (1967) and appeared for Sam Peckinpah in The Wild Bunch (1969). The same year he turned up in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) and True Grit (1969), one of the most productive stretches of his career. He later found fresh comic territory in Slap Shot (1977), continuing to elevate every ensemble he joined until his death in 1980. Read more