Ron Lester, whose husky character Billy Bob provided much of the comic relief in the 1999 Texas high-school football drama Varsity Blues, died Friday of organ failure. He was 45.
On Saturday, his agent, Dave Bradley, told the Associated Press that liver and kidney problems had kept Lester in the hospital since February and that he was taken off life support Friday. He died shortly thereafter.
In a 2014 interview with the website Grantland, a newly svelte Lester had said that acting roles dried up after he lost 300 pounds from gastric bypass surgery. He had once weighed as much as 500 pounds. But the physical damage caused by years of obesity couldn't be completely undone. He suffered from arthritis and spoke publicly about his liver and kidney disease last year.
“Am I alive? Yes. Am I happy? No. Did I throw away my career to be skinny? Yes,” he told Grantland. “I wouldn’t do [the surgery] again. I would much rather have died happy, rich and kept my status, and gone out on top.”
The Georgia-born actor, who had lived in Dallas for the last several years of his life, also had roles in TV's Popular and Freaks and Geeks, as well as the films Good Burger and Not Another Teen Movie, in which he lampooned his Varsity Blues character.
“Ron really is a sensitive, sweet guy," Blues director Brian Robbins said in the Grantland interview. "Billy Bob as a character was such a sensitive soul. He was Billy Bob,” Robbins says. “There was no second choice.”
Contributing: The Associated Press
