Richard Kiel, the hulking 7-foot-2 actor best remembered as the Bond villain Jaws, so named for his steel dentures that chomped spinal cords, shredded vehicles and otherwise violated every socially acceptable use of orthodontia, died Sept. 10 at a hospital in Fresno, California. He was 74.
A son, Richard G. Kiel, said his father had been recovering from surgery for a femur fracture but that the exact cause of his death was unknown. He was a resident of Clovis, California.
With his imposing height and menacing physique, Kiel spent much of his career playing thugs and monsters. He said he often was confused with Ted Cassidy, who played Lurch on “The Addams Family” television show in the 1960s, and with the wrestler Andre the Giant.
It was not hard to see why. Even if he became a household face over the course of more than 80 movie and TV credits, Kiel was never exactly a household name. He entered show business in 1960 and began a long run portraying characters known simply as “Tall Goon,” “Moose” or, in jest, “Tiny.”
Kiel had a rare leading role in “Eegah!” (1962) as a modern-day Neanderthal who lives in the California desert and kidnaps a nubile teenage girl. She is rescued by her boyfriend, who plays in a rock-and-roll band.
“Considered by many to be one of the worst films ever made …” begins the review on the website allmovie.com.
Jaws redefined Kiel’s cinematic appeal. When Bond producer Albert “Cubby” Broccoli approached Kiel to play the role in “The Spy Who Loved Me” (1977), the actor hedged at first, sensing it was another stock “monster part” without interior life.
He later recalled, “It was almost like I don’t think I really want to do this, but there’s like a little voice in my head saying, ‘Richard, this is a James Bond movie. Just make the best of it.’ “
The character was largely mute, so Kiel used unscripted gestures and details to imbue the role with greater depth.
In one fight sequence, Bond (played by Roger Moore) throws Jaws through the window of a speeding train. The villain rolls over live electrical wires before picking himself up, dusting himself off and straightening his tie — a signal that Jaws was a man of dignity and “somebody the average person could identify with,” the actor told The Washington Post.
Jaws ultimately was supposed to be mauled by a killer shark — a nod to his great white namesake. But Kiel said the director’s son so liked the metal-mouthed killer that moviemakers tried to find a way to save the character. The director shot two endings, one in which he lives and one in which he dies.
Kiel said he was kept in the dark about the finale until the premiere.
“At the end there was such a long time after I went into the shark-tank that I thought, ‘I guess that’s the end of me,’ “ he told a Scottish newspaper several years ago. “Then, all of a sudden they cut to the surface of the ocean and Jaws popped up — the audience just screamed and hollered and laughed and applauded. That was the defining moment, the moment that I finally made it big in the movies.”
As Jaws, Kiel returned to the franchise with “Moonraker” (1979), again starring Moore as the sybaritic British superspy. Too popular to kill off, Jaws even winds up helping Bond. His reward: a girlfriend.
“I was delighted to reprise Jaws in ‘Moonraker,’ but my heart sank when producers told me he would fall in love with a 7-foot-7-inch woman,” Kiel told the Express, a British paper. “They accepted my idea that a shorter actress could work after I explained that my own wife was only 5-foot-1, and cast Blanche Ravalec, who was perfect in her pigtails and glasses.”
With the exception of the 1999 Matthew Broderick comedy “Inspector Gadget,” Kiel resisted further offers to revive the role, in part to avoid typecasting and also because he found the steel dental apparatus “kinda nauseating” to keep in his mouth for more than two minutes at a stretch.
In polls regarding Bond-movie henchmen, Jaws often ranked neck and neck as a fan favorite with Oddjob, the assassin who decapitates people with the flick of his bowler.
Richard Dawson Kiel was born Sept. 13, 1939, in Detroit and grew up in Los Angeles, where at 19 he took over his father’s washing machine repair business. He also was a cemetery plot salesman and bouncer before he was offered $70 to play a barroom brawler in a 1960 episode of the TV series “Klondike.”
He went on to play nefarious parts in TV series such as “Wild, Wild West” and “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.” He was a guitar-strumming monster on an episode of “The Monkees.”
He also was a prison inmate named Samson in the Burt Reynolds film “The Longest Yard” (1974) and a bullying golf spectator in the Adam Sandler comedy “Happy Gilmore” (1996).
In the animated Disney feature “Tangled” (2010), Kiel provided the voice of the comically malicious Vladimir, who aspires to be a concert pianist. He sings: “I’d rather be called deadly for my killer showtune medley.”
One of Kiel’s favorite roles was as a duplicitous military officer in “Force 10 From Navarone” (1978), which starred Robert Shaw, a onetime Bond villain. The death of the heavy drinking Shaw soon after filming deeply affected Kiel, who said he turned to God to help him recover from alcoholism.
His first marriage, to Faye Daniels, ended in divorce. Survivors include his wife of nearly 40 years, Diane Rogers of Clovis; four children from his second marriage; a sister; and six grandchildren.
He wrote a memoir, “Making It Big in the Movies.”
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