LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Richard Farnsworth
built 198 days ago
Alvin Straight (Richard Farnsworth) is a bona fide true life stubborn old Codger! A man of few words, his eyesight is failing, he can't get a driver's license, and now his hip is giving out. Alvin lives in a very small town in Iowa with his adult daughter (Sissy Spacek) who some might consider a bit slow, but Alvin feels she gets along just fine. Everyone likes Alvin. He gave up drinking years ago but still meets with the other old timers at the local beer hall every day and talks about whatever old timers talk about. Basically, Alvin leads a pretty quiet life.
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Richard Farnsworth is Manager of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Science and Technology Education Program (STEP) and has worked in STEP for 16 years. He directed the development and implementation at LLNL of a variety of professional development programs for teachers and enrichment programs for students in biotechnology, biophotonics, fusion, astrophysics, and technology for web development. He holds a Master of Education in education psychology from Brigham Young University and formerly was a school counselor on the White Mountain Apache Reservation.
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Throughout The Straight Story, 73-year-old Alvin Straight (Richard Farnsworth) gazes calmly at the night sky, as if the stars were reflections of his own memories. When he hears his brother Lyle (Harry Dean Stanton), with whom he hasn't spoken in years, is ailing Alvin decides to go visit him and make peace. But since Alvin's eyesight is bad and his daughter (Sissy Spacek) refuses to drive him, he sets out on the 500-mile journey from Laurens, Iowa to Mt. Zion, Wisconsin on a John Deere lawnmower. It's slow going, so there's plenty of time to stop for the night and ponder the cosmos. Along the way, he befriends a variety of nice folks, and you have to ask yourself: is this really a David Lynch movie?
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Richard Farnsworth, the unassuming former stuntman whose acting career was jumpstarted this year with an Oscar nomination for The Straight Story, has died of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound. He was 80.
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Looking for a way to pick up some easy money back in 1938, Farnsworth had signed on to be one of the multitude of horsemen in "The Adventures of Marco Palo," the big-budget Gary Cooper picture. He was just a horseman in those days, but he learned you could make pretty good money as a wrangler or stunt rider in westerns, which were plentiful back then.
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Farnsworth has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 1560 Vine Street. In 1997, he was inducted into the Western Performers Hall of Fame at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.
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Richard Farnsworth