Herbert Coward
Herbert Lee "Cowboy" Coward (August 21, 1938 – January 24, 2024) was an American actor best known for his role in the 1972 film Deliverance, where he played Toothless Man, one of two sadistic mountain men. He was born in Haywood County, North Carolina, the ninth child of Fred and Moody Coward. After his mother died young, he left school and worked various jobs to help his family, including at an orchard and operating heavy machinery.
Coward married in the early 1960s and briefly lived in Raleigh before returning to the North Carolina mountains with his wife. He later worked as an outlaw gunfighter performer at Ghost Town in the Sky, a western amusement park in Maggie Valley. An accident at the park knocked out two of his front teeth. While at Ghost Town, he met actor Burt Reynolds, who helped him land a role in Deliverance after producer Dan Blocker suggested him. Reynolds had learned of Coward from Gunsmoke and believed he could bring something special to the film.
In Deliverance, Coward performed his own stunts, including being lowered off a cliff into a river. He became known for the line, “He got a real purty mouth, ain’t he?” After the film, he worked for 27 years at the BASF factory in Asheville, North Carolina. He also appeared in Ghost Town: The Movie (2007) and on television’s Hillbilly Blood (2013). He later appeared on the Discovery Channel show Moonshiners as the caretaker of Ghost Town; on one episode, two moonshiners ask him if they can hide bootleg whiskey there to let it age.
On January 24, 2024, Coward, his girlfriend Bertha Brooks, and their pets—a Chihuahua and a squirrel—were killed in a car crash on Highway 19 between Clyde and Canton, North Carolina. He was 85. Coward’s Deliverance performance helped inspire later works, including the Primus video for “My Name Is Mud,” which sampled lines from the film.
This page was last edited on 3 February 2026, at 14:47 (CET).