Bill Paxton to be honored at Lone Star Film Festival

August 23,2017

By Robert Philpot

As is well-known around here, the late actor Bill Paxton was a Fort Worth native, and even after projects such as “Titanic” and “Big Love” he still paid attention to the Fort Worth arts scene, especially the movie side of it.

In our obituary for Paxton after his death in February at age 61, we noted: “Mr. Paxton didn’t forget his North Texas roots. He was involved in the early stages of setting up Fort Worth’s Lone Star Film Festival as the honorary chair of its advisory board a decade ago.”

The festival announced this week that it will honor Paxton with a special tribute during its Lone Star Film Festival Ball, which kicks off this year’s festival — the 11th — on Nov. 8 at Bass Hall.”

“Bill Paxton was a true visionary,” Chad Mathews, the festival’s executive director, says in a release. “He shined a spotlight on Fort Worth and the Lone Star Film Festival and helped infuse film into the fabric of our community. Our organization owes him a lot and it’s only fitting that we pay honor to the man who helped create our festival. He’s meant so much to Fort Worth.”

This echoes a statement Mathews made after Paxton died unexpectedly Feb. 25 from a stroke suffered 11 days after undergoing surgery to fix an aortic aneurysm and replace his bicuspid aortic valve

“In my first year with the Lone Star Film Festival, I had the pleasure of meeting Bill Paxton,” Mathews said in the statement, quoted in the Star-Telegram obituary. “Not only was he an incredible actor but he was integral in the formation of the film society and festival a decade or so earlier. He was an inquisitive, generous, kind-hearted man, who loved his Fort Worth roots. I will never forget how welcoming he was to me. The stories he shared on life and his hometown will forever have a place in our organization’s history. He will be truly missed.”

The LSFF Ball will also feature dinner and awards, with Paxton being remembered for “his work on the big screen and his commitment to LSFF, along with his love for his hometown.”

The Dallas International Film Festival, which took place March 30-April 9, also honored Paxton, who was also memorialized in April at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. Fellow Fort Worth native and Broadway legend Betty Buckley performed “Amazing Grace” at the memorial, and described Paxton as “the definitive Texas boy...[he] reminds me of the best things of who we are as Texans and as Fort Worthians.”