Veteran American actor Bill Cobbs, who is known for his roles such as Louisiana Slim in The Hitter, Walter in The Brother from Another Planet and Reginald in Night at the Museum has passed away. He was 90, according to The Hollywood Reporter. As per his publicist, Chuck I. Jones, “He died of natural causes at his home in Riverside.” Born on June 16, 1934, in Cleveland, Cobbs was known for his excellent performance as Whitney Houston’s manager in The Bodyguard (1992), the older brother of Medgar Evers in Rob Reiner’s Ghosts of Mississippi (1996), a jazz pianist in Tom Hanks’ That Thing You Do! (1996) and Master Tinker, builder of the Tin Woodsman, in Sam Raimi’s Oz the Great and Powerful (2013).
Cobbs appeared on TV in shows such as The Slap Maxwell Story, The Drew Carey Show, The Gregory Hines Show and Star Trek: Enterprise. He played Moses in the Coen brothers’ 1994 film The Hudsucker Proxy, a mystical clockman whose power to freeze time comes in handy for Tim Robbins’ Norville Barnes.
Cobbs played a supporting role in Night at the Museum as Reginald, a security guard on the verge of retirement. His other remarkable roles were of a basketball coach and retired basketball player Arthur Chaney in Disney’s Air Bud and Medgar Evers’s older brother Charles Evers in Rob Reiner’s Ghosts of Mississippi. He also played the fictional jazz pianist Del Paxton in Tom Hanks’s That Thing You Do. He had a brief appearance in the 2010 film The Search for Santa Paws. In 2020, he made a guest appearance in the two-part series finale of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.
Wilbert Francisco Cobbs was born on June 16, 1934. After graduating from East Tech High School in Cleveland, he served for eight years in the U.S. Air Force, where he experimented with stand-up comedy. He worked for IBM and sold cars before he acted onstage for the first time in 1969 in the anti-apartheid musical Lost in the Stars at Karamu House in his hometown.
