Death of Herbert “Cowboy” Coward, 85-year-old toothless mountain man of “Deliverance”

In an automobile accident in North Carolina on Wednesday, Herbert “Cowboy” Coward, a friend and former actor of Burt Reynolds, passed away. He portrayed one of the two menacing and vicious mountain men in John Boorman’s Deliverance. He was eighty-five.

State Highway Patrol officers in North Carolina revealed his death, as well as the deaths of his girlfriend Bertha Brooks, 78, and their pet squirrel and Chihuahua.

The collision happened on U.S. Route 19/23 in Haywood County, North Carolina, at approximately 3:30 p.m./ET on Wednesday. A 16-year-old driver of a pickup truck struck Coward’s car, according to patrol officers, and the youngster was transported to a hospital for treatment. There are no charges on file.

Troops in North Carolina informed WLOS on television that Coward had just left a doctor’s office when the adolescent motorist, who was not speeding, struck his car. Brooks and Coward were not using seat belts.

Reynold first became aware of Coward in the early 1960s while both of them were performers at an Old West ghost town amusement park in Maggie Valley, North Carolina (where Dan Blocker, star of Bonanza, also began his career). Coward would subsequently claim that an accident with a fake gun at the theme park was the cause of his well-known toothless grin.

Years later, Reynolds recalled Coward and suggested that him play one of the two vicious mountain guys who pursue and rape Ned Beatty’s Bobby Trippe character in the survivalist classic. Coward, who was illiterate at the time, would frequently claim that he invented the well-known line “squeal like a pig,” which was uttered by actor Bill McKinney in the role of the other mountain man.

In addition, Coward devised his own notoriously recalled remark, “He got a real purty mouth, ain’t he?” to be hurled at Beatty’s tied victim.

In the Deliverance credits, Coward’s character was credited as only “Toothless Man.”

Following Deliverance, Coward began a 27-year career with BASF factor in Asheville, North Carolina. In 2007, he made a brief comeback to the screen with Ghost Town: The Movie, and in 2013, he starred in an episode of the television series Hillbilly Blood.