Latest News : Sam Bottoms Dead. Sam Bottoms, a film and television actor who played the role of California surfer-turned-GI Lance Johnson in Francis Ford Coppola's 1979 Vietnam War epic "Apocalypse Now," has died. He was 53.
Sam Bottoms died Tuesday at his home in Los Angeles of glioblastoma multiforme, a virulent brain cancer, said his wife, Laura Bickford.The brother of actors Timothy, Joseph and Ben Bottoms, Sam made his screen debut as a teenager in Peter Bogdanovich's 1971 film "The Last Picture Show," in which Timothy played one of the leads. Sam played Billy, the mute, mentally handicapped boy.
Bottoms was 20 in 1976 when he was cast to play surfer Lance Johnson in "Apocalypse Now," in which he was one of the young sailors who accompany Capt. Benjamin Willard up river in a gunboat for his rendezvous with Marlon Brando's renegade Col. Walter Kurtz.That comes after Bottoms' scenes with Robert Duvall's surf- obsessed Lt. Col.
"Francis is a great general, he's a Gen. Patton, a Gen. Sherman, a great leader," Bottoms said in a 2001 interview with The Times."I was his loyal soldier. I would have done anything he asked. I did, and I'm surprised that I came out of it alive.""He was a handsome, tall young man and very sweet-natured and seemed to be right for that part," Coppola said. "He, Larry Fishburne and Fred Forrest were like a young family almost to me.
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