Bernie Casey

Bernard Terry Casey, known as Bernie Casey (Wyco, West Virginia, 1939 – Los Angeles, 2017), was an American painter and poet, although the public remembers him mainly as an actor. His career shows how a professional athlete could pursue an artistic activity alongside another career during the second half of the twentieth century.

Before turning to art and film, Casey studied at Bowling Green State University, where he excelled as a hurdler and won national honors. He was selected in the 1961 NFL draft by the San Francisco 49ers and played as a wide receiver for eight seasons, first with the 49ers and then with the Los Angeles Rams.

His work as a painter received less public attention than his acting, but it left a concrete mark. In 1969 Doubleday published Look at the People, a book that brought together his paintings and his poems. Pairing image and text was a constant in his personal work, which remained apart from the fame of his film career.

His acting career began in 1969 with Guns of the Magnificent Seven, a sequel to The Magnificent Seven. During the 1970s he became a leading man in the so-called blaxploitation genre, most notably in Cleopatra Jones (1973). He later appeared in Sharky's Machine (1981), in Never Say Never Again (1983), where he played Felix Leiter, and in Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure (1989). For his role in the biographical film Maurie (1973) he won an NAACP Image Award.

Casey died in Los Angeles on September 19, 2017, at the age of 78, after a stroke. His legacy as a painter is modest and poorly documented, while his name endures mainly in film history.