The film and television actor Clarence Gilyard – who was known for supporting roles in the movies Top Gun and Die Hard and for starring in the TV show Walker, Texas Ranger – has died, according to the university where he taught. He was 66.
Gilyard reportedly had long been ill, but no other details were immediately available when the college of fine arts at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV) announced his death in a news release on Monday afternoon.
Fans of the 1986 Tom Cruise blockbuster Top Gun saw Gilyard depict a pilot codenamed Sundown in what was his movie debut. He was also the computer-smart terrorist Theo in the 1988 Bruce Willis flick Die Hard, a role he reprised in a 2021 Super Bowl commercial. And in 1989, he began regularly depicting private investigator Conrad McMasters in the primetime TV lawyer drama Matlock starring Andy Griffith.
Gilyard moved on in 1993 after 85 appearances on Matlock and took on a role as the sidekick to Chuck Norris’s titular character on the TV crime drama Walker, Texas Ranger. He portrayed the character Jimmy Trivette throughout the show’s entire eight-season run – and even directed one of its 196 episodes – before it concluded in 2001.
UNLV brought Gilyard on to its theater department faculty as an associate professor in 2006. He cherished his role as an instructor there and prioritized it over hunting for more on-screen credits, the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported.
According to the Review-Journal, Gilyard described his love of teaching in 2010.
“My manager-agent is not happy that I’m not working, but the university is just too much fun,” Gilyard said at the time. “And once you start a semester and meet those students, it’s like doing a TV series.
“You’re plugged into them. How can you leave them once you see in their eyes that they’re depending on you? They have aspirations for their own growth for those 15 weeks.”
The school’s college of fine arts dean, Nancy Uscher, said in a statement on Monday that Gilyard “deeply inspired” his students.
“His generosity of spirit was boundless – he was always ready to contribute to projects and performances however possible,” Uscher’s statement added.
The film critic Courtney Howard said on Twitter late on Monday that Gilyard’s body of work “solidified his place in film history”, but his academic career was of equal consequence, making an “innumerable impact in real life”.
Before embarking on his acting career, Gilyard was born in Moses Lake, Washington, and grew up in a military family which lived at airbases across the US before settling in California. He later attended the US air force academy for a year and ultimately earned his bachelor’s degree from California State University, Dominguez Hills.
Gilyard was the father of six children. He was divorced from Catherine Dutko and in 2001 married his wife, Elena Gilyard.