Steve Kanaly

Kanaly was born in Burbank, California and grew up in the San Fernando Valley. He attended California State University, Northridge.[1] Kanaly served in the Vietnam War as a radio operator with the First Air Cavalry Division. He provided details of his experiences in the service to Apocalypse Now screenwriter John Milius for scenes in the film involving the character of Colonel Bill Kilgore (Robert Duvall).[2] He once described how he entered film acting-

“It was through John Milius as I mentioned earlier and he wrote a film for himself to direct but that was bought out by Paul Newman’s company who hired John Huston to direct The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean. Through Milius I was introduced to John Huston and Milius suggested that I would be fine to play one of the Western roles in that film, specifically I had never done any acting previous to that. They saw me and I had a meeting and was offered the job , basically I jumped in with both feet and one week turned out to be twelve and you know I said “I think I’m going to stay with this”.