Nicholas Worth

Worth was born in St. Louis, Missouri on September 4, 1937. He served for three years in the army as a paratrooper and studied at the Carnegie Institute of Technology and Pasadena Playhouse.

Worth specialized in playing menacing, threatening characters. His best-known, most typical roles are Kirk Smith, the tormented necrophiliac serial-killer of attractive young women in the low-budget horror film Don't Answer the Phone (1980), and Ray, a fearsome homosexual rapist in the 1985 TV movie The Rape of Richard Beck.

He began with a low-level TV career, appearing in one episode of Charlie's Angels as a kidnapper-on-skates. Subsequently, he played numerous roles as henchmen and tough guys in films such as Swamp Thing (1982), City Heat (1984), Doin' Time (1985), The Ladies Club (1986), No Way Out (1987), Hell Comes to Frogtown (1988), Action Jackson (1988), The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! (1988), Darkman (1990), Best of the Best 2 (1993), Plughead Rewired: Circuitry Man II (1994), Barb Wire (1996) and Blood Dolls (1999). He appeared in the beginning of Heartbreak Ridge (1986) as a convict who gets beaten up by Clint Eastwood and the same year, he played a Divine-like drag queen who loses his clothes to John Candy in Armed and Dangerous. He continued his TV career, playing small roles in sci-fi programs like Star Trek: Voyager and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, and in WKRP in Cincinnati, Knight Rider, Hunter, and Night Court and in "Simon and Simon".

He also did video game work, portraying General Marzaq and Premier Romanov in Westwood Studios' Command & Conquer series of games, Sierra's The Beast Within: A Gabriel Knight Mystery, and Emperor: Battle for Dune.

Worth was an amateur power-lifter and bodybuilder and a born-again Christian.

Worth died of heart failure at Valley Presbyterian Hospital in Van Nuys at the age of 69.