If you spent any time during the 1980s and ’90s hanging around your local video store (I did, but then I was paid to be there), you’ll no doubt recall the names of various actors and actresses who dominated the “direct-to-VHS” action subgenre. Performers like Michael Dudikoff, Olivier Gruner, Linnea Quigley, Cynthia Rothrock, and Tim Thomerson weren’t the sort to show up on the Academy Awards red carpet or headline a $200 million superhero saga. Still, they gave it their all when they were being beaten up by the likes of Jean-Claude Van Damme or chased through a graveyard by a homicidal maniac. Earlier this month one of the most notable of these players–Gerald Dwight Hauser, better known as Wings Hauser–died at 77.
A Hollywood native, Hauser was born in 1947 to a screenwriter/producer father and an actress mother. A football player in high school (his wingback position gave him his stage name), Hauser made his screen debut at 18 in the 1967 WWII drama First to Fight, starring Chad Everett, Dean Jagger, and a young Gene Hackman (who would cross paths with Wings nearly two decades later). Rather than continue with a film career, Hauser spent the first half of the 1970s working as a folk/rock musician and street busker. He adopted the name Wings Livinryte and performed with the band Vision of Sunshine. Wings was also raising his young daughter Bright on his own (the pair lived in an abandoned garage for a time).
After landing a role in a 1975 episode of Cannon, Wings gained small-screen notoriety when he was tapped to succeed Brian Kerwin as lawyer Greg Foster on the CBS daytime drama The Young and the Restless. While playing on the soap from 1977 to 1981, he began racking up an impressive roll call of TV appearances (starting with Baretta, Emergency, and Magnum P.I.) and had a supporting role as a womanizing rock singer named Reddog in the 1982 Joan Collins sex comedy Homework. That same year Hauser turned in a memorable performance as psychotic, Elvis-worshipping L.A. pimp Ramrod in the gritty action/thriller Vice Squad. Whether he was beating his “employees” with a wire hanger “pimp stick” or torturing rival Sugar (Fred “Rerun” Berry), Ramrod was an unforgettable villain. Hauser even sang the film’s theme song, the haunting ballad “Neon Slime.”
1983 saw Hauser switch from actor to author, as he wrote the story for the Vietnam War-set drama Uncommon Valor, starring Gene Hackman and based on the real-life exploits of a friend of Hauser’s. It was then back in front of the camera for the sci-fi shocker Mutant and as a racist Army lieutenant in A Soldier’s Story, both in 1984. He was a suspicious handyman on a remote Greek island in the 1986 thriller The Wind, and 1987’s Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling found him alongside Richard Pryor as a drug dealer. For all his villainous turns, though, Wings preferred playing characters on the right side of the law. He got his chance–sort of–when writer/director Norman Mailer cast him as Provincetown, Cape Cod Police Chief Regency in Tough Guys Don’t Dance. The over-the-top crime drama received divisive reviews but earned Hauser an Independent Spirit Award nomination for Best Supporting Male.
Throughout the ’80s and ’90s Hauser was a steady presence in such diverse film fare as The Carpenter (with Wings as the titular homicidal handyman), The Siege of Firebase Gloria, Beastmaster 2: Through the Portal of Time (which he co-scripted), Tales from the Hood, and Original Gangstas. He got a chance to show off his acting chops with a supporting turn as a tobacco company lawyer in Michael Mann’s 1999 fact-based drama The Insider. Meanwhile, fans could catch him in three recurring roles on TV: as Lt. Miller on the Vietnam War drama China Beach; as the Connors’ neighbor Ty Tilden on Roseanne; and as offbeat P.I. J. Jay Jones on Beverly Hills 90210.
Hauser’s cinematic swan song came as a wheelchair-bound man who encounters a “killer tire” in French filmmaker Quentin Dupieux’s 2010 cult tale Rubber. By this time health issues which were exacerbated by substance abuse and COPD had been slowing him down for several years. Wings passed away on March 15 in the home and animal sanctuary he established with his fourth wife. Along with daughter Bright, he is survived by son Cole Hauser, who is following in his father’s footsteps with roles in such films as Good Will Hunting and Pitch Black as well as the hit series Yellowstone.