I noticed while watching the 2021 Creative Emmy Awards memorial that Alex Cord had died this year. Looking up a death notice I found a headline in some papers “Who was Alex Cord and what was his cause of death?” The article said he died at his home in Texas and was worth 73 million dollars, but didn’t have an answer to the later part. It listed his acting credits, or some of them. Best known for appearing in the CBS TV series Airwolf for two seasons opposite Jan Michael Vincent as the character “Archangel”. He also appeared in remakes of John Wayne movies, Stage Coach and The Searchers, retitled, GreyEagle, and was a familiar face from guest appearances on a number of tv series, including Laramie, Ben Casey, Route 66, Mission Impossible, Simon & Simon, Walker Texas Ranger, and others.
The obit didn’t mention his most important credit, at least to me. Alex Cord played the villain in my first produced action film, To Be The Best. He was the name actor, beside Martin Cove and the younger leads, Michael Worth, Brittany Powell, Phillip Troy, and Stephen Vincent Leigh.
Alex Cord had remarkably recovered from a leg paralysis from childhood polio when he was 12 to become a rodeo rider after he was sent to a ranch in Wyoming to recover. He rode the rodeo circuit, before being accepted into the Shakespeare Academy of Stratford, Connecticut, and then worked in theater in London.
He played rugged types, fitting his rodeo background, and he made a perfect fit for my script, a tough guy businessman in Las Vegas with a plan to build his own casino, who forces the lead fighter character to take a dive. He thought so, too. Alex Cord paid me one of the best compliments of my career.
When I met him on set, filming in the Dean Martin suite of the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas (now the site of the Venetian Hotel), he pulled me aside with a cheerful spirit and said “I love my character! Usually, when I play these things I want to mess around with them, but I don’t want to change a thing!” A young writer can hear nothing better from an actor.
Alex Cord became, even more, my hero when the director wanted to not shoot a scene that I liked a lot. He wanted to cut the scene to save time and budget. The scene took place in the middle of the casino. It was a scene with Alex and Brittany Powell, basically where he smoothly gets her into his velvet villain clutches after she’s run away from getting married after a fight with her boyfriend, the fighter, Worth. I went to Alex. He liked the scene, too, and insisted to the director that the scene needed to be shot, or he’d walk.
They figured out how to shoot with limited coverage amidst clanging slot machines, but at least it got into the movie, which sorely needed character scenes. The director commented to me that he thought the movie had five minutes too much talking when it could have five minutes more action. But if you watch the movie, it really needs another five minutes of talking. In any case, I very much respected Alex Cord and wish his memorial notice for the Emmys was more than just a name among a list of many in the year of Covid.
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