Gailard Sartain, Actor in ‘Hee Haw’ and ‘Mississippi Burning,’ Dies at 81

Gailard Sartain, Actor in ‘Hee Haw’ and ‘Mississippi Burning,’ Dies at 81

Gailard Sartain, the very funny character actor who spent some 20 years on Hee Haw, appeared in three Ernest films with Jim Varney and displayed a flair for the dramatic in The Buddy Holly Story and Mississippi Burning, has died. He was 81.

Sartain died Thursday of natural causes at his home in his native Tulsa, Oklahoma, his wife of 36 years, Mary Jo Sartain, told The Hollywood Reporter. “Actually, he died of silliness,” she said.

Sartain showed up in nine features directed by Alan Rudolph: Roadie (1980), Endangered Species (1982), Choose Me (1984), Songwriter (1984), Trouble in Mind (1985), Made in Heaven (1987), The Moderns (1988), Love at Large (1990) and Equinox (1992).

He appeared for Carl Reiner in The Jerk (1979) and All of Me (1984), for Francis Ford Coppola in The Outsiders (1983), for Stephen Frears in The Grifters (1990), for Jon Avnet in Fried Green Tomatoes (1991) and for Michael Mann in Ali (2001).

In 1972, Sartain joined the cast of the syndicated country variety show Hee Haw, and he would stick around for the next two decades playing such characters as Orville the cook at Lulu’s Truck Stop and the inept clerk Maynard at Gordie’s General Store.

Along the way, he portrayed Willie Billy Honey on the 1978-79 spinoff Hee Haw Honeys alongside Kathie Lee Gifford, Misty Rowe and Lulu Roman.

Sartain was a chef in Ernest Goes to Camp (1987), starring Varney as the bumpkin Ernest P. Worrell, then teamed with Bill Byrge to play airport workers in Ernest Saves Christmas (1988) and clueless bank security guards in Ernest Goes to Jail (1990).

And on the 1988 Saturday morning CBS kids show Hey, Vern, It’s Ernest!, he portrayed Chuck opposite Byrge as Bobby in a brother shtick that two had done for local TV commercials.

In Tulsa, Sartain got his start on a local TV show that also employed Busey, and he landed his first significant role as musician-DJ Jerry “The Big Bopper” Richardson in The Buddy Holly Story (1978), starring Busey at the rock ‘n’ roll pioneer.

Sartain later was memorable as a menacing racist sheriff in Alan Parker’s Mississippi Burning (1988), which he said marked a career milestone for him.

“Nobody likes to be typecast as a barefooted hillbilly, so when I had the opportunity to do other roles, I happily did it,” he told the Tulsa World newspaper in 2017. “I was cast in that, and that kind of turned things around. I wasn’t just typecast as a funny guy. That was a little bit pivotal.”

The son of a fire chief, Gailard Sartain Jr. was born in Tulsa on Sept. 18, 1943. After getting kicked out of private school for mischief, he graduated from Will Rogers High School and the University of Tulsa, then moved in 1968 to New York. There, he landed a job as an assistant to illustrator Paul Davis, a fellow Oklahoman whose work appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times and Playboy.

Back in Tulsa to pursue his master’s degree, Sartain was a cameraman at local station KOTV when he created the late-night show The Uncanny Film Festival and Camp Meeting. He also hosted the program, which featured comedy skits sprinkled amid old B-movies, as the wacky wizard Dr. Mazeppa Pompazoidi.

After three years on that show and starting out on Hee Haw, Sartain made his movie debut in a scene at a lunch counter with Keenan Wynn in Nashville (1975) — Rudolph was Robert Altman’s assistant director on that — then wrote and did skits on CBS variety shows hosted by Cher and the mime duo Shields & Yarnell from 1975-78.

In the early 1980s, he and Byrge starred as Chuck and Bobby in commercials produced by the Nashville ad agency Carden and Cherry, which also did spots with Varney as Ernest. The two played twin brothers that didn’t look anything alike; the burly Chuck was a loudmouth, while the slim Bobby never spoke.

In his Tulsa World interview, Sartain said he enjoyed working with Rudolph because he “would just turn me loose. So I would come up with character accents and stuff, and he would go for it.”

Sartain also portrayed an adviser to Louisiana Gov. Earl Long (Paul Newman) in Ron Shelton’s Blaze (1989), and his impressive big-screen résumé included Howard Deutch’s Getting Even With Dad (1994) and The Replacements (2000); The Hollywood Knights (1980); The Big Easy (1986); Irwin Winkler’s Guilty by Suspicion (1991); Roger Spottiswoode’s Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot (1992); The Patriot (1998); and Cameron Crowe’s Elizabethtown (2005), after which he retired.

As an illustrator, Sartain created the cover for Leon Russell’s 1975 album Will O’ the Wisp (Russell was from Oklahoma, too).

In addition to his wife — they married on New Year’s Eve in 1988 — survivors include his children, Sarah, Esther and Ben; his granddaughter, Chloe; and his great-grandson, Teddy.