EXCLUSIVE 80s action film and sitcom star is unrecognizable on very rare sighting in LA... can you guess who?
One of the most unforgettable faces from '80s action cinema— and later a beloved sitcom curmudgeon—was spotted looking worlds away from his tough-guy roles during a rare outing in Los Angeles on Wednesday.
Now 81, the actor rose to fame as the chilling villain Clarence Boddicker in 1987's RoboCop, and followed it up with a memorable turn as CIA operative Robert Griggs in Rambo III.
But for a whole generation, he'll always be Red Forman—the gruff, no-nonsense dad from That '70s Show, where he sparred lovingly with Ashton Kutcher 's dim-witted Kelso and delivered classic one-liners with perfect timing.
He even reunited with Kutcher years later on The Ranch, slipping right back into the role of a grumpy father figure with ease.
Dressed casually in a bright blue polo and slacks, the Wisconsin native looked relaxed and content—nothing like his stern on-screen personas.
Can you guess the star?
But for a whole generation, he'll always be Red Forman—the gruff, no-nonsense dad from That '70s Show, where he sparred lovingly with Ashton Kutcher 's dim-witted Kelso and delivered classic one-liners with perfect timing
If you said Kurtwood Smith, you're absolutely right!
Back in 2023, Kurtwood Smith opened up about his audition for That '70s Show — and the instant chemistry he shared with his future TV wife, Debra Jo Rupp.
'She was already cast, and they were casting my role. I was the last person cast,' he told Smashing Interviews.
'So when I went in to read the final reading, I don't know what his position was at the time, but he had a really big office (laughs). So I read with Debra Jo there. I guess we must've hit it off, you know.
'I thought she was very funny, and she was. We had a great time.'
Smith, who grew up in the San Fernando Valley, graduated from Canoga Park High School in 1961.
He earned a B.A. from San José State and an M.F.A. from Stanford.
He later taught theater arts at Cañada College before diving into acting full-time.
The film not only solidified Kurtwood Smith's iconic role as the ruthless villain Clarence Boddicker, but also pushed the boundaries of special effects and became a defining entry in the sci-fi action genre of the 80s
But for a whole generation, he'll always be Red Forman—the gruff, no-nonsense dad from That '70s Show, where he sparred lovingly with Ashton Kutcher 's dim-witted Kelso and delivered classic one-liners with perfect timing
Beyond That '70s Show, Smith's career spans decades — from playing a KKK leader in A Time to Kill to memorable roles in Dead Poets Society, Star Trek, and even voice work in Green Lantern: First Flight and Fallout Tactics
Smith, who grew up in the San Fernando Valley, graduated from Canoga Park High School in 1961 and earned a B.A. from San José State and an M.F.A. from Stanford
Kurtwood is actually his real first name — a unique creation by his mother, who, inspired by a country singer named Kurt (or Curt) in the 1940s, thought 'Kurt Smith' sounded too plain and tacked on 'wood' to make it one of a kind
Beyond That '70s Show, Smith's career spans decades — from playing a KKK leader in A Time to Kill to memorable roles in Dead Poets Society, Star Trek, and even voice work in Green Lantern: First Flight and Fallout Tactics.
He also voiced Carpenter K. Smith in AMC+'s Ultra City Smiths.
And Kurtwood is actually his real first name.
According to a past interview on The Caroline Rhea Show, Smith's mother was a fan of a country singer named Kurt (or Curt) back in the 1940s.
She felt that 'Kurt Smith' sounded too short, so she added 'wood' to the end — making him likely the only Kurtwood out there.
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Metro
2 days ago
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RoboCop Unfinished Business preview: ‘We created something bigger than expected'
GameCentral goes hands-on with the standalone expansion of RoboCop: Rogue City, which dials up the action and gory splatter of 2023's surprise hit. For a franchise that has arguably done nothing of worth since the early 90s, the future of RoboCop is looking surprisingly bright. Following Amazon's acquisition of MGM, a new TV show is currently in the works, with rumbles of a new film as well. Whether this leads to a major rejuvenation for everyone's favourite cyborg law enforcer remains to be seen, but the original source of any RoboCop redemption arc has to start with 2023's RoboCop: Rogue City. Developed by Polish studio Teyon, RoboCop: Rogue City was the kind of unexpected surprise you rarely get from licensed games. It recaptured the original's wit and 80s aesthetic, but also found a way to deliver the fantasy of playing as the half-human cyborg without streamlining any of the character's personality. The bloody action was built around his hulking, slow movement, dry one-liners were in abundance, and missions weren't always reduced to mowing down thugs in corridors – you also handed people parking tickets, settled trivial civilian disputes, and, in one wonderfully mundane side mission, did the rounds in the office for a get well card. The game became publisher Nacon's 'best ever launch' with 435,000 players within two weeks. Now, a year and a half later, developer Teyon is back with a standalone expansion. Marketing around Unfinished Business has purposefully dodged the term *DLC*, but as explained by the studio's communications manager, Dawid Biegun, it started out as exactly that. 'When we released RoboCop: Rogue City, we were thinking about, this story has many things [we can] do in the future,' says Biegun. 'We had many paths we could choose. So we basically started slowly developing some new storyline. The game was planned to be DLC but it grew out of control. It was a really rare situation where we created something bigger than we expected, so it became a standalone expansion from then.' Unlike Rogue City, this expansion, which we're told spans around eight hours on average, is centred around one location in the OmniTower. Like most things in the RoboCop realm created by OCP, this promised idyllic housing complex quickly goes south when a band of mercenaries assume control. To restore order, and after a creepy opening where an attack on the Detroit police station leaves several officers frozen solid, RoboCop is assigned to the case. Unfinished Business wastes little time in throwing you into the action, and quickly amps up the chaos. For anyone who has played Rogue City, all the original tenets of the combat are here, albeit with a slight increase in difficulty. You'll be looking for explosive cans to blast, illuminated panels to ricochet bullets off walls, and all the while trying not to expose yourself to too much gunfire. The combat purposefully doesn't have the slick speed of Call Of Duty, but it is still aggressively punchy, with headshots resulting in satisfyingly bloody splatters and RoboCop's famed Auto-9 machine pistol still having the kickback of a pocket pneumatic drill. From the get-go, Unfinished Business pushes back in a way Rogue City never did. New enemies equipped with riot shields are a real nuisance if you don't utilise the ricochet panels, while the ability to slow down time is a much bigger crutch to chip down the enemy numbers from a distance. Health pick-ups felt in shorter supply too, even on the normal difficulty, to the point where we barely scraped through several encounters. While it's unclear if this applies to the whole game, Unfinished Business feels like a gnarlier experience, when compared to the original. RoboCop has some new context sensitive finishing moves, like throwing enemy heads into concrete walls or vending machines, which is a satisfying addition to the melee arsenal. There's greater enemy variety too, between fierce minigun heavyweights and flying drones, along with some neat action set pieces. In one standout, we had to operate a walkway bridge to deactivate a giant turret at the end of a room, dashing between cover as it rains down bullets and destroys the surrounding environment. Anyone who has played action games before will recognise all the mechanics at play in this scenario, but it was still well executed and effective. Another had a whiff of Star Wars, as you rush around shooting electrical panels to stop a trash compactor from crushing you via the descending ceiling. The action shift in Unfinished Business is best defined by a later sequence we got to play, where you take control of the franchise's signature mech, ED-209. If the power fantasy of playing as RoboCop is tested in this expansion, ED-209's section was pure mental catharsis, where you blast away enemy hordes with miniguns and rockets, and clean up any stragglers with a rigid, robotic stomp. The rush of piloting ED-209, with its cacophony of explosions and bullets, felt like a throwback to vehicle sections in a long lost Xbox 360 game – but in a good way. While there's a definite lean towards combat, rather than gift card signing, when compared to Rogue City, it hasn't entirely abandoned the detective side. According to the developers, if Rogue City had a 60/40 percent split between guns and detective work, Unfinished Business 'would be like 70/30, or 80/20' in comparison. More Trending We saw some of this , with one memorable encounter seeing you quizzed by a RoboCop superfan who is unconvinced you're the actual RoboCop, leading to a series of questions based on the history of the franchise. There is optional side missions too, although the time we had with our preview limited our chance to fully delve into them. The sales and positive reviews for RoboCop: Rogue City emboldened Teyon's vision and scope for Unfinished Business – and that confidence shines through in what we played. Some might be disappointed by the steer towards action, and we were heading into this preview, but by the end, this felt like a welcome extension with its own unique flavour. This is RoboCop: Rogue City with its pedal to the floor, confined and concentrated into a lean, tightly focused machine. As for the studio's next steps, the success of RoboCop has only reaffirmed Teyon's strengths and identity as a team. Between its three studios across Poland and Japan, with over 140 employees in total, Teyon wants to maintain its grip within the AA space. 'We feel strong here in such games,' Biegun said. 'We wouldn't want to grow like 200, 300, 400 people, because we're going to lose our soul this way. We want to stay as we are right now.' Email gamecentral@ leave a comment below, follow us on Twitter, and sign-up to our newsletter. To submit Inbox letters and Reader's Features more easily, without the need to send an email, just use our Submit Stuff page here. For more stories like this, check our Gaming page. MORE: Games Inbox: How much are you spending on the Nintendo Switch 2 launch? MORE: How to get a Nintendo Switch 2 this week in the UK MORE: James Bond video game from makers of Hitman will be unveiled this week
Daily Mirror
2 days ago
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RoboCop: Rogue City – Unfinished Business is familiar gory fun as a standalone
If you're seeking a bite-sized shot of punchy 80s action distilled into a standalone first-person shooter, RoboCop: Rogue City – Unfinished Business appears set to go down a treat. RoboCop: Rogue City – Unfinished Business marches to a familiar beat that the base game did, but shakes things up a little with a larger emphasis on shooting and even more enemy types to take down. No modern video game translation of a cult 1987 movie had any right to be as good as the original RoboCop: Rogue City. More than a budget FPS that just slapped the 'RoboCop' name on the box, it genuinely understood the 'part man, part machine, all cop' in a way few video games (and even some movies) before it had, setting players off on a different type of shooter that did excellent justice to the character's heavier, more assertive cadence and movement style. Hence why it wasn't too surprising to see developer Teyon return to this world so soon, not via DLC or a full sequel, but rather a standalone expansion that aims to lock everything the first game did so well to a single tower block. The result won't blow anyone's minds, but it's hard to complain when you're gunning down thugs 80s style while Basil Poledouris' iconic score blasts in the background. Heading into my hour-long demo of RoboCop: Rogue City – Unfinished Business I was genuinely curious just how well this standalone story would work. The original game's narrative turned out to be one of the most surprising things about it, sitting neatly between the events of the second and third movies while offering deeper insight into RoboCop's present and past as he faces a new enemy. Well, for better and worse, very few of these events bleed there way into Unfinished Business it seems. Instead, it elects to focus on an all-new threat that tasks RoboCop with working his way up a single tower block in the manner of Dredd 3D or The Raid to put an end to a hostile takeover. The opening mission actually takes place outside of this OmniTower housing complex, seeing RoboCop explore a recently invaded police precinct that sees all its officers butchered. It serves as a good enough way to reintroduce the base game's unique mechanics (such as scanning and investigating) at a far slower pace than if players were immediately thrown into the action right from the off. It also does well to appropriately establish the stakes. This prologue eventually leads to OCP's discovery of the Omnitower which has been taken over by some of Detroit's worst gangs. You as RoboCop are the only solution, and It isn't too long after that the slaughtering begins. Much like before, the standard Auto-9 pistol is a great way to turn enemy heads into a blood splatter. Only being able to move with a heavy step and therefore a much slower pace than other FPS titles, it pays dividends to take down human enemies as quickly and efficiently as possible. RoboCop's armour means you can take much more of a beating, of course, yet with Unfinished Business I instantly noticed its nature to see your health deplete much faster – likely due to each floor of the OmniTower being so crowded with gangsters able to attack you from all sides. Your move, creep In these instances, as unnatural as it still seems, picking up a sniper, SMG, or even a Rocket Launcher and firing it at enemies is a must. Otherwise, you'll spend more time searching around stages looking for health packs as opposed to dealing out justice in RoboCop's uniquely brutal way. Speaking of which, I was pleased to see that Unfinished Business does much to retain its 18+ rating, with blood splatters and gory deaths only ever just a few trigger pulls away. In fact, this is an expansion that doubles down on the character's immense power, thanks to all-new context sensitive finishing moves that sees the camera temporarily pull out to a third-person view. It's a small touch, but one I came to quickly appreciate. Also new this time around are the new flying type drone enemies, which do much to take your gaze away from merely the ground or the odd balcony when continuously gunning down cretins. When these blighters arrive it was easy to find myself having to step up my reaction times quite significantly – something that's not always easy to do given how slowly RoboCop moves by nature. Other than these, however, much of what I was actually doing in Unfinished Business didn't vary too much from RoboCop: Rogue City. In fact, if anything, action is emphasised a lot more now, since the semi open-world sections that allowed for some semblance of investigation before were nowhere to be seen in the four chapters I played. In the lead up to launch Teyon has teased flashback missions where players will play as Alex Murphy prior to his cybernetic transformation. And although I wasn't able to play any of these myself, I'm genuinely curious to see how this changes the rhythm of gameplay. For now, however, my demo capped off with a sequence where RoboCop himself was bound and restricted in the tower, causing a mysterious new ally to make an ED-209 unit accessible. Facing off against this giant, hulking bot in the base game was a true challenge. That's why actually playing as it in Unfinished Business feels immensely cathartic. Both because it wasn't possible before, yet also as stomping on thugs and blasting entire rows of floors away using rockets and turrets proves wildly destructive. RoboCop: Rogue City – Unfinished Business is the sort of standalone expansion that does exactly what it says on the tin. Though most of its mechanics and presentation style is lifted directly from the base game that came immediately before it, the addition of new weapons, contextual finishing moves, as well as missions that change up your perspective is just about doing enough differently to help give it a unique identity. Better yet, it's shorter runtime will directly correlate with a much cheaper price point compared to a full game, and so far it's narratively riding the line perfectly between those who have played RoboCop: Rogue City and those who have not. There's still a lot to learn about how the story will land and how the Alex Murphy missions will play out. For now, however, it's still hard to imagine any video game nailing the act of being RoboCop as well as this.
Daily Mail
08-05-2025
- Daily Mail
Publishing tycoon 'caught in a lie' after gushing about critically-acclaimed book she 'loved'
A publishing tycoon who gushed over a critically acclaimed book has been accused of lying about ever reading it. Editor Jane Pratt told New York Magazine that 'The Great Pretender: The Undercover Mission That Changed Our Understanding of Madness', by Susannah Cahalan was 'one of the best nonfiction books I've found within the last couple years'. But eagle eyed readers have suggested Pratt is the one pretending, after poking holes in a synopsis she gave to New York magazine. Cahalan's book is an exploration of Stanford psychologist David Rosenhan's experiment, in which he claimed to have sent seven graduate students with fake psychological issues to psychiatric hospitals, only for them to be committed and then unable to get back out. The findings were held up as a watershed moment and a damning indictment on the psychiatry field. However Rosenhan's research has since been widely debunked, including by Cahalan. This aspect was completely omitted by editor Pratt in her summary of the book, which she listed as part of a feature titled '37 Things Jane Pratt Can't Live Without'. Pratt noted that the book covers Stanford University in the 1970s, a period which also produced the infamous Stanford prison experiment. 'This is about a guy from that era who — it's just the most crazy thing — sent people who were not mentally ill to mental institutions,' Pratt said. 'He got them to be accepted, then had them try to prove their sanity to get out, and they couldn't.' Author Freddie deBoer called out the discrepancy in his Substack in an article titled, 'Apparently Jane Pratt Doesn't Actually Read Books; Does the Staff at New York Magazine?' 'This isn't a case of some 19-year-old incompetently summarizing a book they were assigned to read but didn't in college,' deBoer fumed. 'It's an adult woman, an editor and writer, voluntarily participating in this feature and plugging a book she clearly cannot have read. 'Why she would do that, I really can't imagine; surely there's a book that she actually finished that she could recommend? Why do this? However you slice it, it's embarrassing.' Pratt is a veteran of the publishing industry who founded Sassy, a magazine for teen girls when she was just 24-year-old. She has since launched the award winning Jane magazine, online outlet XOJane and Another Jane Pratt Thing among other projects.
