By 1984, Ronny Cox is the steady face in the middle of the chase. In Beverly Hills Cop, he plays Lt. Andrew Bogomil, and after that he keeps turning up in films and television as the man who can stand between the hero and the chaos, from RoboCop in 1987 to Total Recall in 1990.

That road began on July 23, 1938, in Cloudcroft, New Mexico, where Daniel Ronald Cox was born the third of five children to Lounette Rucker and Bob P. Cox, a carpenter who also worked at a dairy. He grew up in Portales, and later said music and performance mattered enough to carry him from a mountain town into the wider world.

At Eastern New Mexico University, he finished in 1963 with a double major in theatre and speech correction, and that blend of voice and stagecraft shaped everything that followed. He married Mary in 1960, had two sons, and stayed with her for life. She had been in his orbit since he was 14 and she was 11, a long thread that ran through the years.

His screen debut came in Deliverance in 1972, and it was no small entrance. Cox was hired because he could play guitar, and in the famous scene he performs Dueling Banjos with Billy Redden, the banjo-playing mountain boy. The film gave him a place in American cinema, and in 2012 he returned to it in his autobiography, Dueling Banjos: The Deliverance of Drew.

Work followed quickly. In 1974 he starred in Apple's Way, created by Earl Hamner, and he also played Mr. Webb in Our Town. By 1977 he was in Quinn Martin's Tales of the Unexpected, and in 1986 he appeared in Murder, She Wrote. The pattern was clear: television, film, guest roles, and a reputation for authority, whether as a mayor, a doctor, or a hard-edged officer.

Then came the big-budget years. In 1984 he entered Beverly Hills Cop as Bogomil, returned for Beverly Hills Cop II in 1987, and the same year played Richard Dick Jones in Paul Verhoeven's RoboCop. In 1990 he was Los Angeles Police Chief Roger Kendrick in Cop Rock and the Mars administrator Vilos Cohaagen in Total Recall, while later roles took him into Star Trek: The Next Generation, Desperate Housewives, and Stargate SG-1.

The cost of that success was a life lived in two lanes. Cox has said music comes first now, and as of 2012 he was still performing more than 100 times a year at festivals and theatres, often with his band and a yearly tour to Ireland. Mary died in 2006, fifty years to the day after their first date, and he still speaks of her in performance.