Ken Foree

Ken Foree

Ken Foree built a substantial career playing toughs, thugs, and heavies on both sides of the law. He maintained a certain amount of prestige for the first decade or so of his acting tenure. Foree debuted as a goon in one of the more critically respected racially themed films of the 1970s: the sports comedy The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars and Motor Kings (1976), starring Richard Pryor and Billy Dee Williams. Foree followed it up with a turn as a National Guardsman valiantly defending his nation against hordes of rampaging zombies (from inside a shopping mall) in the cult classic Dawn of the Dead (1978), played a black sportsman in Phil Kaufman's period piece The Wanderers (1979), and re-teamed with George A. Romero for the medieval fantasy Knightriders (1981). Small roles in two critically respected A-listers -- James Cameron's The Terminator (1984) and Richard Pryor's Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling (1986) -- did much to cement Foree's reputation as a reliable player, but thereafter, he began to sink into less respectable material, with a strong emphasis on long-form work and direct-to-video exploitationers. Pictures such as the 1991 Hangfire and the 1992 Fatal Charm did little to further Foree's career. By the late '90s and well into the 2000s, he seemed typecast as a horror player, in movies such as The Dentist (1996), The Devil's Rejects (2005), and Halloween (2007). ~ Nathan Southern, All Movie Guide