Herbert Coward
American actor
Herbert Lee "Cowboy" Coward (August 21, 1938 – January 24, 2024) was an American actor. He played one of two sadistic mountain men in John Boorman's 1972 film Deliverance (with Bill McKinney), and several of his lines became infamous in pop culture.
Early life
Coward was born in 1938 in Haywood County, North Carolina, the ninth child of Fred and Moody Parker Coward. His mother died at a young age, so he left school and began working a variety of itinerant labor jobs to help support the family, including at an orchard and operating heavy machinery. After getting married in the early 1960s and briefly living in Raleigh, he moved back to the mountains with his wife when she became homesick.
Career
After returning home, a friend offered Coward a job as an outlaw gunfighter at the Old West amusement park, Ghost Town in the Sky in Maggie Valley. While performing at the park with an assortment of acting school students working over their summer break, locals, and professional actors, an accident with a prop pistol resulted in two of his front teeth being knocked out. Known actors, including Dan Blocker, who starred on Bonanza, performed at the park, and one summer, based on his appearances on Gunsmoke, Burt Reynolds appeared there. During this time, Reynolds and Coward became friends. In 1970, when Deliverance began filming in Rabun County, Georgia, Reynolds mentioned to producers that Coward would be an ideal person for a role in the film; they were unable to locate him, so wrote his name on a potential cast board as "Cowboy Coward".
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Herbert Coward” is american actor. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Herbert, Coward and American, not as a finished interpretation.
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The phrase “american actor” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 21, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q79052309. VIAF identifies the subject as 171863558. The Library of Congress control number is n2011042962. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1938, 2024, 1972 and 1970.
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This entry incorporates text from “Herbert Coward” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.