Before playing Buddy Holly, Gary Busey drummed under the name Teddy Jack Eddy
Gary Busey's route to an Oscar nomination ran through a drum kit. He played on Leon Russell records credited as Teddy Jack Eddy, a loudmouth character he invented for a late-night Tulsa comedy show. That musical grounding helped when he was cast as Buddy Holly in 1978, the performance critics still rate as his finest.
Busey was born in Goose Creek, Texas, in 1944 and grew up in Oklahoma. He went to college on a football scholarship, discovered acting, and after a knee injury transferred to Oklahoma State to study theatre, leaving one unit short of a degree. His early career was musical: drumming with the Rubber Band, later with a group called Carp that released one album on Epic in 1969.
The stage name came from The Uncanny Film Festival and Camp Meeting, a local television comedy on KTUL. Busey played a belligerent, know-it-all American hero type, and when he asked co-star Gailard Sartain for a name, Sartain suggested using three: Teddy, Jack and Eddy. Sartain resurfaced years later as the Big Bopper opposite Busey's Holly.
Screen work built steadily through the 1970s. He had a supporting part in Thunderbolt and Lightfoot with Clint Eastwood and Jeff Bridges, was the final character killed on Gunsmoke in 1975, and Barbra Streisand hired him for A Star Is Born after spotting him on television. The Buddy Holly Story earned him an Oscar nomination as a leading man, plus top honours from the National Society of Film Critics. The same year he made Big Wednesday, now a minor cult surfing film.
Later decades cast him as a reliable heavy in hits such as Lethal Weapon, Point Break and Under Siege, and his career took a stranger, self-mocking turn: voicing a character in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, playing himself on Entourage, and becoming the first American winner of Celebrity Big Brother in 2014. A 1988 motorcycle crash without a helmet fractured his skull and left permanent brain damage, which a psychiatrist later suggested had weakened his impulse control. In 2019 he played God in an Off-Broadway musical.
Source: Gary Busey
