From Roscoe to Gen. Beringer, actor Barry Corbin has many roles, even more stories

When you’ve played as many characters as Barry Corbin has in a career spanning decades and hundreds of movies and television shows, you’ll have stories.

On Saturday night, Corbin will hold a live conversation about his career on stage at Arcadia Live. Kerrville-based singer-songwriter Aaron Lacombe and JAM Broadcasting owner Justin McClure will moderate. The show starts at 7 p.m., and tickets are still available.

On Thursday, Corbin gave The Lead a 20-minute interview with some insight into the depth of his storytelling, including a delightful telling of an encounter with an orangutan named Clyde in 1980.

For those unaware, Corbin is one of those actors that can touch every generation. A native Texan, Corbin’s credits are massive. For the late-styled Boomers, they may remember Corbin as John Travolta’s uncle in “Urban Cowboy,” Corbin’s first feature film. His role as Gen. Beringer in 1983’s “WarGames” stands out for the Gen X crowd. Millennials will remember him in the television series, “One Tree Hill ,” as Coach Whitey Durham.

And then there are the Texans, who can recall his role as Deputy Sheriff Roscoe Brown in the 1989 television miniseries Lonesome Dove, a much-beloved adaptation of Larry McMurtry’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel.

“I read that book when it first came out, and I knew it was going to be a miniseries,” Corbin recalled. “I wanted to be a part of it and I didn’t care about what part or anything.”

Corbin had followed the novel’s complicated history, originally developed as a movie script by the late McMurtry and Peter Bogdanovich in 1972. Initially, the concept centered around casting John Wayne as Capt. Woodrow Call and Jimmy Stewart as Capt. Gus McCrae, but Wayne’s longtime collaborator, director John Ford, urged him to back out. McMurty re-acquired the story’s rights and crafted his massive tome to Texas, publishing in 1985 and winning the Pulitzer the following year.

However, the television and broadcast rights were idle until Suzanne de Passe of Motown Pictures bought them and produced the series.

“Bill Witliff, Suzanne de Passe, and Simon Wincer came to town, and they had a list of people who they wanted to see, and fortunately, I was on the list,” Corbin said. “So, they saw me, and they hired me to do Roscoe, which is the best part of the (series), I thought.”

Witliff and de Passe were the producers. Wincer directed the all-star cast featuring Tommy Lee Jones, Robert Duvall, Robert Urich, Diane Lane, Chris Cooper, Anjelica Huston and Danny Glover. The six-hour miniseries was a ratings smash and may be among the finest Westerns ever.

A resident of Fort Worth, Corbin professes a love for the Hill Country, but his schedule keeps him busy. His last visit to Kerrville was more than 30 years ago when he accepted an award with the late actor Ben Johnson during an event at the Y.O. Ranch. Johnson, of course, was one of the great Hollywood cowboys who earned an Oscar for his role in “The Last Picture Show.”

“We had become good friends,” Corbin said of Johnson, who died in 1996. Both men thrived and thrilled in the rodeo arena.

At 83, Corbin is still working and shows no signs of slowing down. In the last three years, Corbin appeared in “Yellowstone” and “Tulsa King.” His resume includes working with dozens of Oscar winners; he worked alongside Tony winners (Hal Holbrook and John Collum), and he’s worked with more Emmy winners than we can list. He said he’s had pretty good luck with directors but not so much with producers.

His latest movie, “Killers of the Flower Moon,” placed him into the same orbit as Oscar winners Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert DeNiro and Martin Scorcese, who directed. The movie is likely to garner Lily Gladstone an Academy Award, which could make her the first indigenous actor to win Oscar’s major acting prize.

“I was delighted,” Corbin said of Gladstone’s historic win at the Golden Globes for best actress. “Lilly is such a delightful woman, and I loved having conversations with her.”

Through the years, he’s had many conversations with actors, worked extensively with Tommy Lee Jones, and enjoyed his back-and-forth with Dabney Coleman on the set of “WarGames.”

Much of Corbin’s works are now on streaming services, but one of his most seminal roles — as the sometimes grumpy booster of Cicely, Alaska — just became available on Amazon Prime. “Northern Exposure,” a critical and commercial hit during its six seasons on CBS from 1990 to 1995, featured Corbin as former astronaut and business mogul Maurice Minnifield.

“I think it touched a nerve at the time that it was done because we were hungry for community,” Corbin explained. “And it was a community of diverse people who got along in spite of their differences.”

And if there’s one thing Corbin learned over the years, it’s never cross a primate. In the 1980 movie Any Which Way You Can, which starred Clint Eastwood, Corbin got a moment to meet the movie’s real star — the Orangutan Clyde.

“I smoked a cigar all the way through that movie,” Corbin said. “And I come into the bar at the Palomino Club out there in North Hollywood, and (Clyde) is sitting at the bar, and I come in and sit next to him. His trainer said don’t look him in the eye. I said, ‘OK, don’t worry about that I’m not going to look at him at all.’ And he said if he wants your cigar let him have it. I said if he wants my clothes, he can have it. And that was my introduction to that monkey.”