Bill Cobbs, a veteran actor who became a universal and sage screen presence as an older man, has died at 90 years old. He died at his home in the Inland Empire, California, surrounded by friends and family, according to his publicist Chuck I. Jones. Jones said natural causes are the likely cause of death. The Cleveland native acted in movies like “The Bodyguard,” “Night at the Museum,” and “The Hudsucker Proxy.” He made his first big on-screen appearance in a fleeting role in 1974’s “The Taking of Pelham One Two Three.”

He became a lifelong actor with some 200 film and TV credits. Most of those came in his 50s, 60s, and 70s as TV producers and filmmakers turned to him again and again to fill small but important parts with a worn and shrunken soulfulness. He also appeared on TV shows, including “The West Wing,” “The Sopranos,” and “Good Times.” He was the mystical clock man of the Coen brothers’ “The Hudsucker Proxy,” Whitney Houston’s manager in “The Bodyguard,” and the doctor of John Sayles’ “Sunshine State.” He also played the security guard in “Night at the Museum,” the coach in “Air Bud,” and the father on “The Gregory Hines Show.”

Cobbs rarely got the kinds of major parts that stand out and win awards. Instead, Cobbs was a familiar and memorable everyman who left an impression on audiences, regardless of screen time. He won a Daytime Emmy Award for outstanding limited performance in a daytime program for the series “Dino Dana” in 2020. Wendell Pierce, who acted alongside Cobbs in “I’ll Fly Away” and “The Gregory Hines Show,” remembered Cobbs as “a father figure, a griot, an iconic artist that mentored me by the way he led his life as an actor,” he wrote on the social media platform X. Wilbert Francisco Cobbs, born June 16, 1934, served eight years in the U.S. Air Force after graduating high school in Cleveland.

In the years after his service, Cobbs sold cars. One day, a customer asked him if he wanted to act in a play. Cobbs first appeared on stage in 1969. He began to act in Cleveland theater and later moved to New York, where he joined the Negro Ensemble Company, acting alongside Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee. Cobbs later said acting resonated with him as a way to express the human condition, particularly during the Civil Rights Movement in the late ‘60s. “To be an artist, you have to have a sense of giving,” Cobbs said in a 2004 interview. “Art is somewhat of a prayer, isn’t it? We respond to what we see around us and what we feel and how things affect us mentally and spiritually.”