The Twilight Zone episode "Steel" came filled with tough guys. Legendary man's man Lee Marvin starred in the sci-fi tale of robot boxers. His character gets into the ring in place of a robotic pugilist named "Battling Maxo." The centerpiece of the story is a match in the ring between Marvin and an android named The Maynard Flash.

The man behind the unmoving face of the Flash was Chuck Hicks, a towering stuntman. Well, Hick was more than a mere stuntman. Prior to The Twilight Zone, he had portrayed one of Robert Stack's agents, LaMarr Kane, in The Untouchables. It was one of his more prominent, recurring roles. 

Elsewhere, on Batman this member of the Stuntmen's Hall of Fame was a frequent henchman for King Tut, and played unnamed roles like "Thug," "Redneck" and "Angry Man."

"I was the bad guy, always getting beat up," Hicks told The Los Angeles Daily News in 2011.

His work most often came back to boxing. In Cool Hand Luke, another tough-guy classic, he played the prisoner known as "Chief" and coordinated a brutal fight between George Kennedy and Paul Newman.

But Hicks was most often an imposing opponent for Clint Eastwood. The two first worked together in the Rawhide episode "The Greedy Town" in 1962. The two would later pair in Paint Your Wagon (1969), Dirty Harry (1971), Magnum Force (1973), The Enforcer (1976), Every Which Way but Loose (1978), Bronco Billy (1980), Any Which Way You Can (1980) and City Heat (1984).

The California native continued to work — as both an actor and stuntman — until 2010, when he was in his 80s. Hicks died on May 4 in his Las Vegas home, according to The Hollywood Reporter. He was 93.

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