Later Years
Willard parlayed his boxing fame into an acting career of a sort. He acted in a vaudeville show, had a role in Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, and starred in a 1919 feature film The Challenge of Chance. In 1933, he appeared in a bit part in a boxing movie, The Prizefighter and the Lady, with Max Baer and Myrna Loy.
On his passing in 1968, Jess Willard was interred in the Forest Lawn, Hollywood Hills Cemetery in Los Angeles, California.
In 2003, he was inducted posthumously into the International Boxing Hall of Fame.
Willard and a dispute he had with Harry Houdini is the topic of Andy Duncan's Nebula Award nominated novella "The Pottawatomie Giant."
Read more about this topic: Jess Willard
Famous quotes containing the word years:
“Her fist of a face died clenched on a round pain;
And sculptured Ann is seventy years of stone.
These cloud-sopped, marble hands, this monumental
Argument of the hewn voice, gesture and psalm,
Storm me forever over her grave”
—Dylan Thomas (1914–1953)
“Porter: O.K., O.K., you win. I’ll marry you. How ‘bout it?
Lora May: Thanks. For nuthin’.
Porter: Now what kind of an answer is that?
Lora May: I don’t know. I just felt like it, that’s all.
Porter: We’ll do all right, kid. We’re startin’ out where it takes most marriages years to get.”
—Joseph L. Mankiewicz (1909–1993)