Career
After Pasadena Playhouse he moved onto Lee Strasberg's Actors Studio, making his movie debut in exploitation pic She Freak (1967). For ten years he was a teacher at Cave Spring Middle School. He made his television debut in 1968 on an episode of The Monkees and attracted attention as Lobo in Alias Smith and Jones. It was the film Deliverance which provided his breakthrough in 1972, and remains his signature role.
He cemented his reputation as an onscreen villain in the 1970s with appearances in Junior Bonner, The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean and The Parallax View. It was with Clint Eastwood that McKinney would become most associated, becoming part of Eastwood's stock company after they worked together in Michael Cimino's Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, in which McKinney played a character called Crazy Driver. He starred as 'Capt. "Redlegs" Terrell' in The Outlaw Josey Wales under Eastwood's direction. He appeared in another six Eastwood films from The Gauntlet in 1977, Every Which Way but Loose in 1978, Any Which Way You Can in 1980, Pink Cadillac in 1989 when the stock company disbanded.
Other memorable roles include a misanthrope who is done in by John Wayne's The Shootist. He also appeared in such later films as First Blood (1982), Heart Like a Wheel (1983), Against All Odds (1984), Back to the Future Part III (1990), and The Green Mile (1999). He appeared in the TV movie The Execution of Private Slovik (1974), while guest-starring on such television shows as The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, Starsky and Hutch, The A-Team, Murder, She Wrote and Columbo. He also had an uncredited role in the TV miniseries Roots (1977), playing alongside Georg Stanford Brown, Lloyd Bridges and Burl Ives.
McKinney took up singing in the late 1990s, eventually releasing an album of standards and country & western songs appropriately titled Love Songs from Antri, reflecting Don Job's pronunciation of the infamous town featured in Deliverance. One of his songs featured in the film Undertow, directed by David Gordon Green. He also played Jonah Hex in an episode of Batman: The Animated Series called "Showdown". In February 2010 he accepted a role in the Robin Hood–inspired horror film Sherwood Horror and formerly had a short cameo in 2001 Maniacs.
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