Sam Bottoms, the actor who played “California surfer-turned-GI Lance Johnson in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now has died from brain cancer. He was 53,” according to a story in the LA Times.
Bottoms was 20 in 1976 when he was cast to play surfer Lance Johnson in “Apocalypse Now,” in which he was one of the young sailors who accompany Capt. Benjamin Willard ( Martin Sheen) up river in a gunboat for his rendezvous with Marlon Brando’s renegade Col. Walter Kurtz. . . . Bottoms died Tuesday at his home in Los Angeles of glioblastoma multiforme, a virulent brain cancer, said his wife, Laura Bickford.
Bottoms helped create some of surfing’s most iconographic moments in serious film. And he will be missed.
[Link: LA Times]
