Richard Kiel

Richard Kiel, the towering American actor forever known to Bond audiences as Jaws, died of a heart attack in a Fresno hospital on September 10, 2014. He was seventy-four — three days short of his seventy-fifth birthday. Born in Detroit on September 13, 1939, and raised partly in California, he stood seven feet two and learned early that casting directors saw a spectacle before they saw a craftsman. He worked westerns, science fiction, and television bit parts until The Spy Who Loved Me (1977) and Moonraker (1979) turned a steel-toothed henchman into an oddly beloved figure — dangerous, then comic, then almost sympathetic. He wrote about the experience with a performer's awareness that the mask can outlive the face. Off-screen he was a Christian speaker, a family man, and an advocate who treated his height as a fact rather than a punch line. Later cameos and voice work kept him visible without trapping him entirely in one role. Fans who met him at conventions often mentioned manners before steel teeth. He died in Fresno on September 10, 2014. The character remains larger than life; the actor spent years proving he was larger than the character.