That guy you’ve seen but can’t remember his name: Inside cult actor Warren Oates

Idiosyncratic actor Warren Oates, the frequent partner in crime to maverick director Sam Peckinpah in such landmark films as “The Wild Bunch” and “Ride the High Country,” is profiled in an entertaining interview with biographer Susan Compo. Seen above as G.T.O., an intense Oates stares into the camera during a sunny afternoon spent shooting Monte Hellman’s cult classic “Two-Lane Blacktop,” ultimately released on July 7, 1971. Image Credit: Cinema.de / Universal Studios

Though never a household name, cult actor Warren Oates lit up the screen in a 25-year career inexplicably extinguished much too soon by a massive heart attack at age 53 on April 3, 1982.

The American New Wave actor’s preeminent biographer, Susan Compo, exclusively elaborates in a fascinating interview about Oates’ hell-raising and humanity, best and worst movie roles, working alongside the mercurial Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper, and what she might have said to Oates if their paths had intertwined.

Compo released the first-ever biography devoted to the notoriously private individual, Warren Oates: A Wild Life, in 2009 — over 500 pages chock full of extensive notes and interviews with family and close friends.

Oates’ hardscrabble Depression-era upbringing in the predominantly coal-mining community of Depoy, Kentucky, no doubt influenced his honest, scene-stealing characterizations as the voyeuristic deputy of In the Heat of the Night, a good-natured outlaw gang member in The Wild Bunch, the psychotic pill-poppin’ villain in Lee Van Cleef’s Barquero, a roguish, tall-tale spewing car driver in Two-Lane Blacktop, the sympathetic, eerily facsimile gangster called Dillinger, and Bill Murray’s constantly exasperated nemesis in the comedy blockbuster Stripes.