There is a scene in Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather: Part II (1974) that crystallises the entire film career of the character actor GD Spradlin, who has died aged 90. As the corrupt senator Pat Geary, Spradlin asks the mafia boss Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) for a bribe so that he can grant gaming licences to the "family" for several casinos in Nevada. During the meeting, Geary launches into an attack on the Corleones, a name he pronounces with derision. "I intend to squeeze you. I don't like your kind of people. I don't like to see you come out to this clean country with oily hair and trussed up in those silk suits trying to pass yourselves off as decent Americans. I'll do business with you, but the fact is I despise you masquerading in the dishonest way you pose yourself."
Spradlin makes the speech more powerful by delivering it without venom, but in a matter-of-fact manner. Needless to say, the senator gets his comeuppance. He is blackmailed by the Corleones after waking up in bed covered in blood next to a murdered prostitute after an alcoholic blackout. The role was just one of Spradlin's many vivid portrayals of smarmy politicians, sadistic generals and other unspeakable authoritarian figures who invite retribution.
The 6ft 2in Spradlin, with a scowl often playing on his lips, was an imposing presence in films and television for three decades. Yet he only started acting professionally in his mid-40s, having led a varied life. The son of schoolteachers, he was born in Oklahoma. He gained a degree in education from the University of Oklahoma before serving in the US army air force in China during the second world war. After earning a law degree from the University of Oklahoma in 1948, he became an attorney for Phillips Petroleum.
In 1951 Spradlin became an independent oil producer. He was so successful that he retired nine years later, giving himself time to direct John F Kennedy's 1960 presidential campaign in Oklahoma and to earn an MA in Latin American studies from the University of Miami. After an unsuccessful run for mayor of Oklahoma City in 1965, he moved his family to Los Angeles.
Spradlin's acting debut was on television in 1966, one of his first roles being a colonel in the comedy series Gomer Pyle, USMC. His first two films were both directed by Tom Gries and starred Charlton Heston, as an ageing cowboy in Will Penny (1968) and an ageing American football player in Number One (1969). Spradlin, still to make his mark, had small parts.
He was more visible as tough characters in Monte Walsh (1970), starring Lee Marvin as a cowboy trying to come to terms with the end of the old west, and in the gory and repellent The Hunting Party (1971). In 1972 Spradlin directed two forgettable low-budget movies, The Only Way Home and Outside In, before his acting career gained a boost with The Godfather: Part II.
In One On One (1977), Spradlin was in his element as a tyrannical basketball coach, a role very similar to his cold-hearted football coach in North Dallas Forty (1979), though the typecasting benefited his acting profile. In Apocalypse Now (1979), Coppola's nightmarish Vietnam war drama, Spradlin plays General R Corman (an homage to the director's mentor Roger Corman), one of the men who recruits Captain Willard (Martin Sheen) to "terminate" Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando) "with extreme prejudice". He spells out the reasons methodically. "Every man has got a breaking point. You and I have. Walter Kurtz has reached his. And very obviously, he has gone insane."
Perhaps drawing on his days as an oil tycoon in The Formula (1980), Spradlin convincingly played an unscrupulous oilman who proposes raising his company's petrol prices. "The people will accept the 12 cents now because we can blame it on the Arabs," he tells his business partner (Brando). The latter replies: "You're missing the point. We are the Arabs." Continuing on his unprincipled way, Spradlin, still curling his lip, was equally effective as a CIA boss in The Man With the Deadly Lens (1982); a martinet commandant of a southern military academy in The Lords of Discipline (1983), and an ignorant and malicious small-town sheriff in Tank (1984).
Meanwhile, he was appearing in several television mini-series, which ostensibly gave him a chance to play more sympathetic characters, notably two US presidents, Lyndon Johnson in Robert Kennedy and His Times (1985) and Andrew Jackson in Houston: The Legend of Texas (1986). His last film was the Watergate comedy Dick (1999), in which he portrayed the Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee.
Spradlin is survived by his second wife, Frances; and by two daughters, Tamara and Wendy, by his first wife, Nell, who died in 2000.
