‘Hee Haw,’ ‘Fried Green Tomatoes’ Star Dead at 81

Gailard Sartain, the Tulsa, Oklahoma-born character actor with nearly 75 TV and movie roles to his credit, died on Thursday, June 19. Sartain was 81 years old.

TMZ confirmed Sartain’s passing with Tulsa’s The Church Studio—a church-turned-recording studio and home to the Tulsa sound musical movement, and where Sartain’s wife, Mary Jo, was a volunteer.

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The Church Studio CEO Teresa Knox told TMZ that Sartain’s health had been in decline for a while. The organization described Sartain as “an extraordinary actor, artist, and comedian.” Mary Jo, Sartain’s wife of nearly 40 years, later paid tribute to her husband’s obvious sense of humor by claiming he died of “silliness.”

Sartain got his start as an actor in the early 1970s, including as a regular on legendary sketch series Hee Haw, where he appeared in two dozen episodes between 1972 and 1974.

In 1975, Sartain made an uncredited appearance in Robert Altman’s Oscar-winning Nashville and starred as the Big Bopper in 1978’s The Buddy Holly Story. It was that first part, however, that would lead to one of the actor’s longest and best known collaborations.

Alan Rudolph, a protege of Altman’s who worked as his assistant director on Nashville, clearly liked what he saw in Sartain. The two would go on to work together on nine films, beginning with 1980’s Roadie and most recently in 1992’s Equinox.

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According to The Hollywood Reporter, Sartain enjoyed working with Rudolph because the director “would just turn me loose,” he once said. “So I would come up with character accents and stuff, and he would go for it.”

Sartain’s Southern upbringing bled into his professional career, where he often played up Southern tropes for laughs. His decades’ worth of credits include The Jerk, The Outsiders, Nine to Five, the Ernest movies, Mississippi Burning, The Grifters, Fried Green Tomatoes, and Ali. His last film credit was logged 20 years ago, in Cameron Crowe’s Elizabethtown.