Actor and star of The Walking Dead

Born: March 29, 1942;

Died: October 6, 2018

SCOTT Wilson, who has died of leukemia aged 76, received personal praise from both the legendary writer Truman Capote, for playing one of the killers in the disturbing 1967 film of his book In Cold Blood, and from Pope John Paul II, for his performance as a 19th century Polish saint in the 1997 movie version of his play Our God’s Brother.

A familiar character actor for half a century, Wilson reached a contemporary audience in the recurring role of the farmer and veterinarian Hershel Greene in the hit zombie drama series The Walking Dead between 2011 and 2014.

Wilson had made only one film, playing a murder suspect in In the Heat of the Night (1967), before being cast as real-life killer Richard Hickock in In Cold Blood. Director Richard Brooks wanted unknowns to play the two petty criminals who break into a farmhouse in search of money and kill the four occupants. The killers achieved further posthumous publicity after they were executed as the subject of Capote’s famous book.

Brooks stuck closely to the facts of the case and even used the actual Kansas farmhouse location, which had lain empty since the time of the murders. “Brooks wanted to create a film so unique to itself and so realistic that no-one would relate it to movie stars,” said Wilson many years later. “I think he would have been happier if he could have hanged us at the end of the film, so we couldn't talk about it.”

The film, which was shot in black and white with a deliberate documentary feel, was nominated for four Oscars, but was overshadowed by Bonnie and Clyde, which was much more stylised and made anti-heroes of its gangsters, played by the strikingly good-looking Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway.

Brooks may have wanted anonymous leads – according to Wilson he refused to even mention them by name in interviews – but both Wilson and co-star Robert Blake went on to successful acting careers.

Wilson’s many subsequent roles include the garage owner who kills Robert Redford in The Great Gatsby (1974), in the mistaken belief that he is having an affair with his wife, test pilot Scott Crossfield in the 1983 adaptation of Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff and a victim in another real-life murder drama Monster (2003), for which Charlize Theron won the Best Actress Oscar.

He was born William Delano Wilson in 1942, the son of a building contractor, who died when Wilson was young. He secured a basketball scholarship to Georgia’s Southern Polytechnic State University, but dropped out of an architecture degree to hitchhike to Los Angeles in the hope of becoming an actor.

He worked in petrol stations and as a parking assistant and appeared in local theatre before getting his break in the Oscar-winning film In the Heat of the Night, with Sidney Poitier.

It had not even come out when he got his role in In Cold Blood, on the recommendation of Poitier and helped no doubt by the fact he bore some resemblance to Hickock.

Wilson appeared on the cover of Life magazine with Blake and Capote and went on to appear in a string of mainstream movies in quick succession, including Castle Keep (1969), The Gypsy Moths (1969), The Grissom Gang (1971) and The New Centurions (1972), though he remained ambivalent about In Cold Blood.

He did not see Hickock as anything other than a “jerk” who committed a “heinous act”. In an interview in 2000, when the film was shown at the London Film Festival, he said: “"I would rather the film had never been made, the book never written and the crime never committed.”

In the same interview he was much more positive about Our God’s Brother, which was based on a play by Pope John Paul II, written before he became Pope. Wilson played Albert Chmielowski, a priest who devoted his life to God and working for the poor.

Wilson was at a private screening for the Pope. “He stood there for a long time, holding my hand and looking in my eyes and said ‘You have reached deeply into the character’.”

Wilson played a prison chaplain in Dead Man Walking (1995) and a general in Pearl Harbor (2001) and made his debut in The Walking Dead in its second season in 2011, as a farmer who provides sanctuary for refugees from the zombie apocalypse.

When they are overrun he escapes with the survivors, who make their new home in a prison. A kindly, authoritative father figure, he was killed off in the fourth season. Wilson is survived by his wife Heavenly.

BRIAN PENDREIGH