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Gary Busey

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Gary Busey

William Gary Busey (/ˈbjuːsi/; born June 29, 1944) is an American actor. He portrayed Buddy Holly in The Buddy Holly Story (1978), for which he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor and won the National Society of Film Critics Award for Best Actor. His other starring roles include A Star Is Born (1976), D.C. Cab (1983), Silver Bullet (1985), Eye of the Tiger (1986), Lethal Weapon (1987), Hider in the House (1989), Predator 2 (1990), Point Break (1991), Under Siege (1992), The Firm (1993), Drop Zone (1994), Black Sheep (1996) and Lost Highway (1997).

William Gary Busey was born on June 29, 1944, in Goose Creek, Texas, the son of Delmar Lloyd Busey and Sadie Virginia Busey (née Arnett). While he was in fourth grade, Busey moved to Tulsa, Oklahoma, where he later attended Bell Junior High School, then attended and graduated from Nathan Hale High School. Busey attended Coffeyville Community College before attending Pittsburg State University in Pittsburg, Kansas, on a football scholarship, where he became interested in acting. After a knee injury, he then transferred to Oklahoma State University in Stillwater, Oklahoma, to study theater. He quit school just one unit short of graduation.

Busey began his showbusiness career as a drummer in the Rubber Band. He appears on several Leon Russell recordings, credited as playing drums under the name "Teddy Jack Eddy" a character he created when he was a cast member of a local television comedy show in Tulsa, Oklahoma, called The Uncanny Film Festival and Camp Meeting on station KTUL (which starred fellow Tulsan Gailard Sartain as "Dr. Mazeppa Pompazoidi"). For his skits on Uncanny Film Festival, Busey drew on his American Hero, belligerent, know-it-all character. When he told Gailard Sartain his character needed a name, Sartain replied, "Take three: Teddy, Jack and Eddy."

He played in a band called Carp, which released one album on Epic Records in 1969. Busey continued to play several small roles in both film and television during the 1970s. In 1975, as the character "Harvey Daley", he was the last person killed on the series Gunsmoke (in the third-to-last episode, No. 633 – "The Busters").[citation needed]

In 1974, Busey played Truckie Wheeler in the ABC television comedy The Texas Wheelers. During that same year he made his major film debut with a supporting role in Michael Cimino's buddy action caper Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, starring Clint Eastwood and Jeff Bridges.

In 1976, he was hired by Barbra Streisand and her producer-boyfriend Jon Peters to play Bobby Ritchie, road manager to Kris Kristofferson's character in the remake film A Star is Born. On the DVD commentary of the film, Streisand says Busey was great and that she had seen him on a TV series and thought he had the right qualities to play the role.

In 1978, he starred as rock legend Buddy Holly in The Buddy Holly Story with Sartain as The Big Bopper. For his performance, Busey received the greatest critical acclaim of his career and the movie earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor and the National Society of Film Critics' Best Actor award for him. In the same year he also starred in the small yet acclaimed drama Straight Time and the surfing movie Big Wednesday, which is now a minor cult classic.

In the 1980s, Busey's films included the critically acclaimed western Barbarosa (1982), the comedies D.C. Cab (1983) and Insignificance (1985), the Stephen King adaptation Silver Bullet (1985), and the action film Eye of the Tiger (1986). He played one of the primary antagonists opposite Mel Gibson and Danny Glover in the action comedy Lethal Weapon (1987). He also starred in the psychological thriller Hider in the House (1989).

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