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Fred Ward, a veteran actor who brought a gruff tenderness to tough-guy roles in such films as The Right Stuff, The Player and Tremors, has died. He was 79.

Ward died Sunday, his publicist Ron Hofmann said Friday. No cause or place of death was disclosed per the family’s wishes.

Ward earned a Golden Globe and shared the Venice Film Festival ensemble prize for his performance in Robert Altman’s Short Cuts, and played the title character in Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins. He also reached new heights playing Mercury 7 astronaut Virgil “Gus” Grissom in 1983′s Academy Award-nominated film The Right Stuff.

“Devastated to learn about the passing of my friend, Fred Ward,” tweeted actor Matthew Modine, who co-starred with Ward in Short Cuts and Alan Rudolph’s Equinox. “A tough façade covering emotions as deep as the Pacific Ocean. Godspeed amigo.”

A former boxer, lumberjack in Alaska and short-order cook who served in the U.S. Air Force, Ward was a San Diego native who was part Cherokee. One early big role was alongside Clint Eastwood in 1979’s Escape From Alcatraz.

“I mourn the loss of Fred Ward, who was so kind to me when we worked together on Remo Williams,” actor Kate Mulgrew tweeted. “Decent and modest and utterly professional, he disarmed with a smile that was at once warm and mischievous.”

Ward’s other roles included a rumpled cop chasing a psychotic criminal played by Alec Baldwin in George Armitage’s Miami Blues. He was a formidable and intimidating father to both Freddie Prinze Jr.’s character in Summer Catch and David Spade’s title character in Joe Dirt.

Ward played President Ronald Reagan in the 2009 Cold War espionage thriller Farewell and had a supporting role in the 2013 action flick 2 Guns, starring Denzel Washington and Mark Wahlberg.

In the horror-comedy Tremors, Ward paired with Kevin Bacon to play a pair of repairmen who end up saving a hardscrabble Nevada desert community beset by giant underground snakes.

With the sexually charged, NC-17 Henry & June, Ward showed more than just grit. Based on the book by Anais Nin and directed by Philip Kaufman, Ward played novelist Henry Miller, opposite Maria de Medeiros as Nin and Uma Thurman as Miller’s wife, June. “My rear end seemed to have something to do with (that rating),” he told The Washington Post.

He also reteamed with Altman for the part of a studio security chief in the director’s 1992 Hollywood satire The Player, and played a union activist and Meryl Streep’s workmate in Mike Nichols’ Silkwood in 1983.

Ward demonstrated his comedy chops playing a terrorist intent on blowing up the Academy Awards in Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult in 1994.

On the small screen, he had recurring roles on NBC’s ER playing the father of Maura Tierney’s Abby Lockhart in 2006-07 and guest starred on such series as Grey’s Anatomy, Leverage and United States of Tara. Ward most recently appeared in the second season of HBO’s True Detective as the retired cop father of Colin Farrell’s Detective Ray Velcoro.

Ward is survived by his wife of 27 years, Marie-France Ward, and his son, Django Ward.
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Rugby’s biggest tournament is finally heading to the United States. 

Now comes the hard part for the sport’s leadership: Generating enough interest and sustainability to secure the sport’s place in a crowded U.S. market. 

The Rugby World Cup will be staged in the U.S. for the first time after being voted on Thursday as the host of the men’s event in 2031 and the women’s tournament two years later. 

It marks rugby’s biggest attempt to move into the wider American sporting consciousness and unlock what World Rugby — the sport’s international governing body — regards as an area of untapped potential, in both a commercial and sporting sense. 

“The golden nugget that everybody wants to get hold of” was how World Rugby chairman Bill Beaumont described America. 

“What we will leave in the U.S.,” he said, “is an extremely sustainable, vibrant sport that will go from strength to strength.” 

USA Rugby’s vision is of countrywide membership more than quadrupling to 450,000 by 2031, of stadiums “from coast to coast” staging matches — there have been around 25 venue bids, including from NFL and Major League Soccer arenas — and of significant investment in the domestic Major League Rugby so the U.S. Eagles are a competitive team in time for 2031. 

A competitive, perhaps quarterfinal-bidding team, would crucially be necessary for the Eagles and the World Cup to get traction in the U.S. The Rugby World Cup is staged during September-October, when America is already transfixed by the NFL and college football, the Major League Baseball pennant races and playoffs, and the start of the NBA and NHL. 

USA Rugby already has some experience. The Rugby World Cup Sevens at the baseball home of the San Francisco Giants in July 2018 drew more than 100,000 people across three days, and U.S.-decent TV ratings on NBC. 

“(The World Cups are) an invitation to increase our levels of awareness, to increase our sport’s fan base,” said Victoria Folayan, who played sevens rugby for the U.S. and is USA Rugby’s athlete representative. “The doors are opening. Being able to take that step is just the beginning.” 

To that end, World Rugby’s experience of taking its men’s showpiece tournament to Asia for the first time in 2019 — when Japan was the host and reached the quarterfinals — will be key in getting the U.S ready for its debut. Not just the public, but the national team itself. 

While the U.S. women’s team won the inaugural women’s Rugby World Cup in 1991 and reached the final in the next two events, the men’s national team has never got out of the pool stage in eight trips to the World Cup — three wins in 25 matches — and is basically shut out from playing the world’s top teams on an annual basis. 

As it did successfully for Japan, World Rugby will pour coaching expertise into the Eagles and work to give them more test matches to improve. There is an ongoing attempt to shake up the men’s international calendar so that emerging teams like the United States have more opportunities. 

Hosting the two World Cups will cost around $500 million, and profits and losses will be shared between World Rugby and USA Rugby, which filed for bankruptcy as recently as 2020. 

The bid received support from the White House, with U.S. President Joe Biden sending a letter to World Rugby last month giving government guarantees and his backing for the “development of rugby in the United States.” 

The men’s Rugby World Cup is regarded by some as the world’s third biggest sporting event, after the soccer World Cup and the summer Olympics. 

The United States is hosting all three of those in a five-year span from 2026, starting with the men’s soccer World Cup that year — with Mexico and Canada as co-hosts — and then the Olympics in Los Angeles in 2028. 

For the first time, World Rugby used a streamlined bid process to enable it to announce the hosts of all the World Cups from 2025-33, for both men and women. 

The Sydney Harbour Bridge was lit up in green and gold after two-time-champion Australia was awarded the men’s World Cup in 2027 and the women’s tournament in 2029. The men’s World Cup is returning to Australia for the first time since 2003. 

It is being viewed as a chance to rejuvenate rugby in the country as the World Cups come after the British and Irish Lions tour of Australia in 2025, bringing much-needed revenue to its governing body that was badly hit by the pandemic. 

Rugby Australia chief executive Andy Marinos described it as “the start of a new era for Australian Rugby.” 

“Australia will become the center of the rugby world over the next decade,” he said, “and that is incredibly exciting.” 

The 2027 tournament will be the 40th anniversary of Australia and New Zealand hosting the first Rugby World Cup in 1987. 

England was announced as the host of the women’s World Cup in 2025. 

 
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