Joe Don Baker

This biography of a living person needs additional citations for verification. Please help by adding reliable sources. Contentious material about living persons that is unsourced or poorly sourced must be removed immediately from the article and its talk page, especially if potentially libelous. Find sources: "Joe Don Baker" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (July 2021) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

Joe Don Baker (born February 12, 1936) is an American retired actor, known for playing "tough guy" characters on both sides of the law.^[1] He established himself as an action star with supporting roles the Westerns in Guns of the Magnificent Seven (1969) and Wild Rovers (1971), before his breakthrough role as real-life Tennessee Sheriff Buford Pusser in the film Walking Tall (1973).

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Baker found success playing both leading and supporting roles, including a mafia hitman in Charley Varrick (1973), a brute force detective in Mitchell (1975), a legendary baseball player in The Natural (1984), a police chief in the Chevy Chase comedy Fletch (1985), and a morally dubious private investigator in Martin Scorsese's Cape Fear (1991). He played both a villain and an ally in three James Bond films: as Brad Whitaker in The Living Daylights (1987) with Timothy Dalton, and as CIA agent Jack Wade in GoldenEye (1995) and Tomorrow Never Dies (1997) with Pierce Brosnan.

For his portrayal of offbeat CIA agent Darius Jedburgh in the BBC television serial Edge of Darkness (1985), he was nominated for a BAFTA TV Award for Best Actor. He was also nominated for a Satellite Award for Best Supporting Actor for playing Alabama governor Big Jim Folsom in the made-for-television film George Wallace (1997).