'80s Actor and United States Veteran Turns 88

Though many may not know his name, many will recognize his face, especially since he was on many TV screens throughout the 1970s and 1980s.

Britt Leach is best known for his character work, playing funny, blue-collar workers and tough cops in classic 1970s and 1980s movies. He is best known for his work on The Great Outdoors, playing Reg, a man who was struck by lightning 66 times, playing Anthony Michael Hall’s plumber dad in the show Weird Science and his recurring role as Easy Jackson in The Waltons. In addition, he guest-starred on various hit shows like The Brady Bunch, Murder, She Wrote, Sanford and Son, The Partridge Family and more.

Leach was born on July 18, 1938, in Gadsden, Alabama, before attending college at Northwestern University in Illinois, but he didn’t finish and instead worked in Army intelligence. Throughout his college years at Birmingham Southern College and Northwestern, he was very active in college theater.

He started his acting career in the early 1970s, making various appearances in various TV shows and movies, including Jackson County Jail, Night Warning, Silent Night, Deadly Night, The Last Starfighter, Weird Science and The Great Outdoors. In the fall of 1976, Leach was cast in the role of airplane mechanic Mickey “Wig” Wiggins in the CBS adventure series Spencer’s Pilots, starring Gene Evans, Christopher Stone and Todd Susman.

His last role in a movie was in Father of the Bride, where he played a supermarket assistant manager who confronts Steve Martin’s character for making a scene in the grocery store and has him imprisoned for it. He left acting altogether in the early 1990s and became a co-editor and publisher for Country Connections, a magazine that covered ecology, politics and environmental and progressive social issues.

After Country Connections shut down due to a lack of funds, Leach started writing poetry and became a freelance writer for various sites. In an interview from 2014, Leach told Kickin’ it Old School that he and his wife, Catherine, left Los Angeles and moved to the mountains up north. Catherine is a photographer and they raise a cat named Alex. In an interview in 1987, Leach revealed that he and Catherine have two kids together, and is now a grandfather.

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