Acting career
Elam made his screen debut in 1949 in She Shoulda Said No!, an exploitation film in which a chorus girl's habitual marijuana smoking ruins her career and then drives her brother to suicide. Over the next decade as an actor, Elam continued to perform most often in gangster films and Westerns, firmly establishing himself in those genres as a reliable and memorable villain or "heavy". In fact by the end of the 1950s, various American news outlets and moviegoers were referring to him as "the screen's most loathsome character".
On television in the 1950s and 1960s, he made multiple guest-star appearances on many popular Western series, including The Lone Ranger, Gunsmoke, The Rifleman, Lawman, Bonanza, Cheyenne, Have Gun – Will Travel, Zorro, The Rebel, F Troop, Tales of Wells Fargo, The Texan, and Rawhide. In 1961, he played a slightly crazed bus passenger on The Twilight Zone episode "Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?". That same year, he also portrayed the Mexican historical figure Juan Cortina in "The General Without a Cause", an episode of the anthology series Death Valley Days. In 1962, Elam appeared as Paul Henry on Lawman in the episode titled "Clootey Hutter".
Elam was the antagonist of the 1960 film The Girl in Lovers Lane, which was subsequently the subject of a season-five episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000.
In 1963, Elam portrayed a heroic character, appearing as the reformed gunfighter Deputy US Marshal J. D. Smith in the ABC/Warner Bros. series The Dakotas, a Western intended as the successor of Cheyenne. The Dakotas ran for 19 episodes. He was then cast as George Taggart, "a former gunfighter who has become a U.S. marshal", in the 1963–1964 NBC/WB series Temple Houston.
In 1966, Jack Elam was cast in his first comedic role by Paramount Pictures, playing Hank in the Western film The Night of the Grizzly starring Clint Walker. The next year, for the Harold Hecht production The Way West, he was chosen for another light-hearted role, playing Preacher Weatherby and providing support to costars Robert Mitchum, Richard Widmark, and Kirk Douglas in a story about a wagon train traveling the Oregon Trail. Then in 1968, Elam performed in the opening scenes of Sergio Leone's celebrated "spaghetti Western" Once Upon a Time in the West. In that film, he portrays one of a trio of gunslingers sent to a train station to kill Charles Bronson's character. Elam, in one sequence, spends a good portion of his screen time simply trying to rid himself of an annoying fly, finally capturing the elusive insect inside the barrel of his pistol.
In 1969, he played another comedic role in Support Your Local Sheriff!, which was followed two years later by Support Your Local Gunfighter, both opposite James Garner. After his performances in those two films, Elam found his villainous parts dwindling and his comic roles increasing. (Both films were also directed by Burt Kennedy, who had seen Elam's potential as a comedian and directed him a total of 15 times in features and television.) Between those two films, he also played a comically cranky old coot opposite John Wayne in Howard Hawks's Rio Lobo (1970). In 1974–1975, he was cast as Zack Wheeler in The Texas Wheelers, a short-lived comedy series in which he portrayed a long-lost father returning home to raise his four children after their mother dies. Also on television, in 1979, he performed as Frankenstein's monster on the CBS sitcom Struck by Lightning, but the show was canceled after only three of eleven episodes produced were aired (the remaining eight episodes remain unaired in the US while all episodes were aired in the UK the following year). He then appeared in the role of Hick Peterson in a first-season episode of Home Improvement alongside Ernest Borgnine (season one, episode 20, "Birds of a Feather Flock to Taylor").
Elam portrayed Doctor Nikolas Van Helsing, a "crazed proctologist", in the 1981 action-comedy film The Cannonball Run, and three years later, he reprised the role for the production's sequel, Cannonball Run II. Elam then played the character Charlie Hankins, a town drunk, in the 1986 "Weird Western" picture The Aurora Encounter. During production, Elam developed what would become a lifelong relationship with an 11-year-old boy in Texas named Mickey Hays, who suffered from progeria. The 1987 documentary I Am Not a Freak portrays the close friendship between Elam and Hays. Elam, in what may be an apocryphal quote, said, "You know I've met a lot of people, but I've never met anybody that got next to me like Mickey."
In 1986, Elam also co-starred on the short-lived comedy series Easy Street as Alvin "Bully" Stevenson, the down-on-his-luck uncle of Loni Anderson's character, L. K. McGuire. In 1988, Elam co-starred with Willie Nelson in the made-for-television movie Where the Hell's that Gold?
In 1994, Elam was inducted into the Hall of Great Western Performers of the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.
