I am not proud of the fact that Hank Worden made it onto the schedule because of Cop Rock, wherein he appears to be playing himself. He’s been hired for one of the Mayor’s ads to become a Senator, and he’s grumbly about how unprofessional the shoot is. (It sounds like they’re violating union rules, which is not a way to win votes in Los Angeles.) He points out that he worked with John Ford. Which Worden did. Repeatedly. He also worked with Howard Hawks, Cecil B. DeMille, and of course David Lynch. He appeared in a vast number of classic films, admittedly often in minor, uncredited roles. But I admit it; it was watching him on Cop Rock that reminded me.
Worden is one of the actors who got a job after having been a rodeo rider. This is unlikely as a career trajectory now, both because rodeo seems less of a popular entertainment and because there are a lot fewer Westerns being made. He and Tex Ritter were practically drafted into Green Grow the Lilacs, one of the things that helped launched Ritter’s career but did nothing in particular for Worden’s at first. Worden even spent some time as a cab driver. Eventually, Worden drifted to Hollywood, having met Billie Burke and been recommended to producers by her.
And, yes, Worden was one of the members of John Ford’s stock company. He appeared in a dozen Ford works and a total of seventeen John Wayne movies. Often that was in a small role; sometimes, it was uncredited. However, let’s be real—being there is noteworthy. One imagines you pick up quite a lot of stories from being in 3 Godfathers and The Searchers. I don’t know how good Worden was at telling stories, but it’s not difficult to imagine David Lynch asking him for details between takes on Twin Peaks. Or Fred Gerber, who’s had a long and solid TV career including Worden’s episode of Cop Rock and also the pilot of Due South.
It isn’t just John Ford stories, either. He was also in The Music Man. The Little Foxes. The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. And if he was in Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, he was also in Every Which Way But Loose. He had one of those Working Actor careers, where he made a lot of terrible movies because it paid the bills but also made some stone-cold classics because he was around and people respected his work, and also frankly because the law of averages means that it’s unlikely that all 181 movies he was in would be bad.
And, of course, he was a staple of Westerns. Movies and TV shows. If that meant recurring appearances on Petticoat Junction, it also meant recurring performances on Bonanza. He was a staple figure, one you’d just get used to seeing around. And in one of those sweet moments that we don’t see enough of, in his last years, he had a roommate. Namely actor Jim Beaver, himself not exactly unfamiliar with the Western genre. He died peacefully while taking a nap at age 91—on my birthday, actually—and there are definitely worse ways to go.