Brad Dourif on AllMovie

Brad Dourif is a slightly-built co-starring actor whose performances have an unpredictable edginess. After attending college he had a three-year apprenticeship with New York's Circle Repertory. He studied with the celebrated drama coach Sanford Meisner. Dourif debuted onscreen as Billy, the vulnerable, stuttering mental patient in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975), for which he received a "Best Supporting Actor" nomination. His first lead role came in his fourth movie, John Huston's Wise Blood (1979), in which he portrayed the obsessed preacher of the Church Without Christ. After appearing in several more films which, like Wise Blood, failed to succeed at the box office, he took three years off from the screen and taught directing at Columbia University. After 1984 he began working in films fairly often, but most of them have been forgettable "B"-movies; one exception has been Alan Parker's Mississippi Burning (1988), in which he played a bigoted, wife-beating deputy sheriff of a small town in the '60s.