Forster was a performer whose all-American looks could convey a deeper, more complex personality, something Quentin Tarantino and David Lynch picked up on
If ever an actor grew into his looks, it was Robert Forster, an actor whose cleancut mainstream handsomeness evolved and cragged up over the forty-odd years of his career in film and TV into something that fascinated audiences and directors alike. He started out looking like Alain Delon’s roughed-up elder brother; later he came to be a coolly charismatic and distinctive
American character actor who lent style and weight to any movie or TV show he was involved in.
His all-American face grew to contain something enigmatic, unreadable, and yet beguiling: on the surface a millpond calm of competence and experience, the face of an authority figure – often a uniformed authority figure – who nevertheless knew about heartache and violence but could keep his own pain discreetly or gallantly under wraps. Or he could play the bad guy – or at any rate the ordinary guy who trafficked with the good and bad guys and whose studied, mysterious neutrality and emotional control would allow him to survive and come through.