Remembering Art LaFleur
When I saw the news that character actor Art LaFleur had passed away after a decade’s long battle with Parkinson’s disease earlier this week, I knew we had to put our regularly scheduled programming on hold and take a moment to pay tribute to the great Art LaFleur.
Art LaFleur is probably best known for playing Babe Ruth in The Sandlot, but prior to stepping up to the plate as The Great Bambino, LaFleur made some memorable contributions to the action genre…
My personal favorite Art LaFleur role came in 1985’s Zone Troopers, where LaFleur played Mittens… one of three American soldiers who find themselves trapped behind enemy lines in Italy during World War II. But Mittens, Joey (Timothy Van Patten) and The Sarge (Tim Thomerson) aren’t the only ones trapped there… a space alien crash landed there and now finds itself a prisoner of the Nazis. My favorite scene in the movie is easily when Mittens is confronted by The Führer himself, Adolf Hitler, and Mittens rears back and punches Hitler right in the kisser!
Zone Troopers was not the first Empire Pictures film that Art LaFleur and Tim Thomerson teamed up in. A year prior the two starred together in Trancers, where LaFleur played Sgt. McNulty, a handler of sorts for Thomerson’s Jack Deth. That is no easy task considering Deth is not only a maverick cop, he is also a maverick cop who is sent back to 1985 to track down the man that killed his wife. LaFleur would reprise the role of McNulty in 1991’s Trancers II.
In 1986, LaFleur played Marion Cobretti’s boss, Captain Sears, in Cobra. Sears takes some heat for Cobretti’s style of police work, from his superiors and Cobretti detractors like Detective Monte (Andrew Garfield). But Sears knows when to give Cobretti enough leash to get the job done… and in the case of the Night Slasher, Cobretti needs a lot of leash. LaFleur’s presence and look made him the perfect authority figure and those characteristics would soon come into play again but in a much different way…
The usually likeable LaFleur got to play the nasty Sergeant DeGraf in 1990’s Death Warrant opposite Jean-Claude Van Damme. DeGraf was the hard ass head prison guard and part of the conspiracy to harvest the organs of prisoners for sale on the black market. DeGraf didn’t just make life miserable for undercover cop in prison, Louis Burke (Jean-Claude Van Damme), but Burke’s fellow inmates including Hawkins (Robert Guillaume) and Burke’s undercover “wife” Amanda Beckett (Cynthia Gibb).
LaFleur also had supporting roles in 1990’s Air America and 1998’s Best of the Best 4: Without Warning. And over the years, Art LaFleur would make notable guest appearances on several action adventure TV series including The A-Team, Pacific Blue, Baywatch and Renegade.
Everyone at Bulletproof Action extends their condolences to Art LaFleur’s family, friends and fans.
