With his varied work experiences, this rough-hewn character lead excels at playing blue collar types and working class heroes. Ward worked in mime and masque theater and performed in cabarets in Europe and Northern Africa before moving to Rome where he translated spaghetti Westerns and appeared in two TV-movies directed by seminal Italian neorealist filmmaker Roberto Rossellini--"The Power of Cosimo" (1974) and "Cartesia" (1975). After some lean times in LA (where he supported himself selling jewelry on the street), Ward made his feature debut as a jailbreak buddy of the even craggier Clint Eastwood in Don Siegel's "Escape From Alcatraz" (1979).