L.Q. Jones

L. Q. Jones was an American actor.

Jones portrayed ranch hand Andy Belden on 25 episodes of NBC's The Virginian.

He was one of the guys who slipped a noose over Clint Eastwood's neck in Hang 'Em High (1968) and played a sheriff on the 1983-84 NBC primetime soap The Yellow Rose, starring Sam Elliott, Cybill Shepherd and Chuck Connors.

Jones kept extremely busy, appearing on such shows as Cheyenne, Gunsmoke, Laramie, Wagon Train, Lassie, Rawhide, Johnny Ringo, The Big Valley, and Perry Mason — sometimes doing two or three series a week — and in films including Target Zero (1955), Love Me Tender (1956), Flaming Star (1960), Hell Is for Heroes (1962), and The Naked and the Dead (1958).

In a career that spanned more than five decades, Jones is perhaps best known for his turn as the bounty hunter T.C. in Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch (1969).

Jones first worked with Peckinpah in 1960 on the short-lived NBC Western Klondike. He portrayed one of the four brothers who fight it out with Joel McCrea and Randolph Scott in Ride the High Country (1962) and was a Confederate soldier in Major Dundee (1965).

He also played characters who meet their untimely ends in Peckinpah's The Ballad of Cable Hogue (1970) and Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid (1973).

The Texas native, born Justus Ellis McQueen (he took his stage name from his first movie role), portrayed Clark County Commissioner Pat Webb in Martin Scorsese's Casino (1995) and country singer Chuck Akers in Robert Altman's A Prairie Home Companion (2006), his final credit.

On the other side of the camera, Jones directed, co-wrote and produced A Boy and His Dog (1975), a cult black comedy set in the post-apocalyptic year of 2024 that starred Don Johnson and Jason Robards and was based on a novella by sci-fi legend Harlan Ellison.

Jones died July 9, 2022 in Hollywood, California. He was 94.