Clarence Gilyard’s wife, Elena Gilyard, has been missing since the University professor died on November 28. Clarence Darnell Gilyard Jr. was an American university lecturer, actor, and novelist. He appeared on stage, cinema, and in television shows as a performer. Clarence A. Gilyard was his given name on occasion.
Gilyard was most known for his performances in the legal drama series Matlock, which ran from 1989 to 1993, as Conrad McMasters, Ben Matlock’s right-hand man and second private investigator, Pastor Bruce Barnes in the Left Behind film trilogy, James “Jimmy” Trivette, Cordell Walker, and Theo. Cordell Walker was played by Chuck Norris in the 1990s crime thriller Walker, Texas Ranger.
Gilyard portrays high school coach Devin Wade in the “Longshot” mode of Madden NFL’s 2018 version. Two years later, Bruce Willis and actor Gilyard appeared in a commercial for Advance Auto Parts’ DieHard brand of automobile batteries, in which Gilyard reprised his role as Die Hard criminal gang member Theo. He was an associate professor in the theatre department of the College of Fine Arts at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
Does Clarence Gilyard and Elena Gilyard Have a Son?
Elena and Clarence Gilyard have been happily married since 2001. The pair maintained a low profile. As a result, details concerning their marriage are kept hidden. Gilyard took his second marriage very seriously and was determined to make it work no matter what.
As a consequence, he took a break from his popular program “Walker, Texas Ranger” to focus on his wife. “I meant to focus on my approaching marriage,” he remarked in an interview. I knew I couldn’t expose a young marriage to network television after watching it for 15 years straight.” The actor’s dedication to his marriage paid off; the pair stayed married till his death on November 28. They have three children together. Gilyard has also sheltered his children from the media. His children’s identities are still unknown, albeit one of them was born in 2007 and was given the name Peter Gilyard. Gilyard’s first marriage, to Catherine Dutko, was annulled. They were the parents of two children.
Clarence Gilyard’s Family
Gilyard, the son of Barbara and U.S. Air Force officer Clarence Gilyard Sr., was born on Christmas Eve 1955 in Moses Lake, Washington, into a military family. Gilyard is the second of six children. Despite his family’s origins in New Orleans, Louisiana, Gilyard was reared on Air Force bases in Hawaii, Texas, and Florida. He was reared mostly as a Lutheran until converting to Catholicism in the 1990s. Gilyard was a young adult who attended Eisenhower High School and lived in Rialto, a San Bernardino, California neighborhood. He graduated with honors from high school in 1974 and spent a year as a cadet at the Air Force Academy before quitting the service to attend Sterling College.
Gilyard was a member of the Sigma Chi fraternity and played football in college. He was also offered a tennis scholarship, but he dropped out before completing his studies. Gilyard lived with his parents throughout high school and was concerned with women, alcohol, and, on occasion, narcotics. He and a buddy relocated to Long Beach, California, in response to his parents’ wishes to leave. Clarence studied acting at California State University, Long Beach, and worked as a waiter in between auditions. He earned a bachelor’s degree from California State University, Dominguez Hills.
Gilyard worked at a job with a roommate, where he finally rose to the rank of manager. He temporarily ceased doing this in order to work marketing industrial chemicals. Gilyard returned to school in 2003 and earned a master of fine arts in theatrical performance from Southern Methodist University.
Clarence Gilyard Net Worth
Clarence Gilyard’s estimated net worth at the time of his death was $5 million, according to Celebrity Net Worth. Gilyard made his acting debut in Top Gun in 1986 as Lt. (JG) Marcus “Sundown” Williams, an F-14 Tomcat radar intercept officer. In 1986, he portrayed a soldier in The Karate Kid Part II. In the 1988 action film Die Hard, he portrayed Theo, a criminal computer genius and the only remaining bad guy. He also appeared in Left Behind: The Movie and Left Behind II: Tribulation Force as Reverend Bruce Barnes. From 1989 until 1993, he co-starred in Matlock with Andy Griffith as Conrad McMasters, Ben Matlock’s private investigator.
He replaced Kene Holliday, who was sacked for drug and alcohol misuse. In season three, Gilyard began to appear in almost every episode of Matlock. When the sitcom switched networks for its seventh season, from N.B.C. to ABC, production was moved from Los Angeles to Wilmington, North Carolina. Gilyard agreed to Andy Griffith’s proposal to move there, which he did before departing the following year to work on a prototype for another CBS series. In 1993, he began a second, long-running co-starring role on Walker, Texas Ranger alongside Chuck Norris. Gilyard played James “Jimmy” Trivette, a fellow Texas Ranger and Walker’s best friend.
Near the conclusion of the episode, Norris marries his longtime companion, an assistant district attorney, and Gilyard finds love. Gilyard appeared in Walker, Texas Ranger: Trial by Fire, a 2005 television film. Gilyard returned to acting in 2012, after taking a break to teach, mostly in unaffiliated plays. In 2014, he starred in the spiritual film A Matter of Faith. Gilyard co-starred alongside Sheree J. Wilson, a former Walker, Texas Ranger co-star, in the Neil Simon Festival production of Driving Miss Daisy on January 17, 2016, at the University of New Mexico’s Popejoy Hall.