Jim Beaver

About

James Norman Beaver Jr. (born August 12, 1950) is an American actor, writer, and film historian. He portrayed Bobby Singer in Supernatural. He also played Whitney Ellsworth on the HBO Western drama series Deadwood, which brought him acclaim and a Screen Actors Guild Awards nomination for Ensemble Acting, Sheriff Shelby Parlow on the FX series Justified, and Robert “Dakota Bob” Singer on the Amazon Prime Video series The Boys. He appeared in starring roles in two films directed by Guillermo del Toro, Crimson Peak and Nightmare Alley. His memoir Life’s That Way was published in April 2009.

Beaver was born in Laramie, Wyoming, the son of Dorothy Adell (née Crawford) and James Norman Beaver, a minister. His father was of English and French heritage; the family name was originally de Beauvoir, and Beaver is a distant cousin of author and philosopher Simone de Beauvoir and Pennsylvania governor General James A. Beaver. Beaver’s mother has Cherokee, German, and Scottish ancestry, and is a descendant of three-time U.S. Attorney General John J. Crittenden.
Although his parents’ families had both long been in Texas, Beaver was born in Laramie, as his father was doing graduate…