Richard Kiel, the 7-foot-2 actor who played Jaws, the James Bond villain with the teeth of steel, died Wednesday. He was 74.
Kiel broke his leg last week and died in St. Agnes Medical Center in Fresno, Calif., according to several media reports.
Kiel's signature character appeared in the Bond films The Spy Who Loved Me (1977) and Moonraker (1979). The actor also played an alien in the famed 1962 Twilight Zoneepisode "To Serve Man," a hitman in theGene Wilder-Richard Pryorcomedy Silver Streak (1976) and Adam Sandler's boss in the classic golf comedy Happy Gilmore (1996).
The Detroit native also stood tall as bad guys in such TV shows as The Man From U.N.C.L.E., The Wild, Wild West andKolchak: The Night Stalker and auditioned for the role as the mean green guy in the CBS series The Incredible Hulk, a role that went to Lou Ferrigno.
The Bond character of Jaws was inspired by author Ian Fleming's description of a crook who went by the name of Horror and had steel-capped teeth in the 1962 novel The Spy Who Loved Me.
In the Spy Who Loved Me film - which was released two years after Steven Spielberg's Jaws - Kiel's invincible giant battles a shark in a shark tank, has a construction scaffold collapse on him and drives a car off a cliff into someone's roof - and lives to tell about it, of course. For Moonraker, Jaws survives a fall from an airplane and a high-speed tramway crash. Both Bond films starred Roger Moore as 007.
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