Veteran American actor, Bill Cobbs who starred in top movies like ‘The Bodyguard’ and ‘Air Bud’ has died. He was 90 years old.
Cobbs died Tuesday at his home in the Inland Empire, California, surrounded by family and friends, his publicist Chuck I. Jones said. There was no suspected foul play in his death.
A Cleveland native, Cobbs acted in such films as “The Hudsucker Proxy,” “The Bodyguard” and “Night at the Museum.” He made his first big-screen appearance in a fleeting role in 1974′s “The Taking of Pelham One Two Three.” He became a lifelong actor with some 200 film and TV credits.
Cobbs appeared on television shows including “The Sopranos,” “The West Wing,” “Sesame Street” and “Good Times.” He was Whitney Houston’s manager in “The Bodyguard” (1992), the mystical clock man of the Coen brothers’ “The Hudsucker Proxy” (1994) and the doctor of John Sayles’ “Sunshine State” (2002).
He also played the coach in “Air Bud” (1997), the security guard in “Night at the Museum” (2006) and the father on “The Gregory Hines Show.
Bill won a Daytime Emmy Award for outstanding limited performance in a daytime program for the series “Dino Dana” in 2020.
Wilbert Francisco Cobbs, born June 16, 1934, served eight years in the U.S. Air Force after graduating high school in Cleveland.
He began to act in Cleveland theater and later moved to New York where he joined the Negro Ensemble Company, acting alongside Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee.
“To be an artist, you have to have a sense of giving,” Cobbs said in a 2004 interview. “Art is somewhat of a prayer, isn’t it? We respond to what we see around us and what we feel and how things affect us mentally and spiritually.”
