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1 Thursday, April 02, 2009 040109.01 Hollywood Journey: From Law School to Prairie Scum By Mike OSullivan, Los Angeles Some of the finest performers in Hollywood are character actors, who are often seen on screen but are hardly household names to audiences. William Sanderson, who plays a sheriff in the series True Blood on the HBO cable network, is one of those actors. He is a native of Memphis, Tennessee, says he is often cast in Westerns as an outlaw or derelict because of his southern accent. He finds himself playing the kind of unkempt characters he jokingly calls prairie scum. He was the quirky E. B. Farnum in the series Deadwood. The award-winning show, set in the historical Western town of Deadwood, South Dakota, mixed fact and fiction with offbeat humor and raw language. Sanderson played a neurotic, obsequious and greedy character, a hotel owner who became the towns mayor. Sanderson often gets small roles but sometimes plays memorable characters. One of the best-known was the toymaker and genetic designer J. F. Sebastian in the 1982 science fiction classic Blade Runner. The film by director Ridley Scott starred Harrison Ford and Daryl Hannah. It concerned a future world where humans felt threatened by the clones they had created. Sanderson says it was a high point in more than 100 film and television roles. I played a lot of renegades, you can imagine, with this accent, or derelicts, but after Blade Runner, because William Sanderson as Sheriff Bud Dearborne VOA Special English_Extensive Reading 2 I played a genetic engineer with two hours of makeup, I began to also get what they call more sympathetic parts. It would have been nice to be a romantic lead. But since I will not win any beauty contests, I am not counting on it, he said. Sanderson started acting in New York after a hitch in the U.S. Army. He then got help to go to college