Clifford Worley was a major character in the 1993 action-romance film True Romance, which is part of the Tarantinoverse. He was a policeman and Clarence Worley's estranged father.
He was portrayed by the late Dennis Hopper.
Biography[]
Clifford Worley worked as a policeman in the Detroit Police Department before leaving the police force and working as a security guard; he was once married, but his wife divorced him, and he became estranged from his son Clarence Worley.
During the events of the film, Clifford is reunited with Clarence after he married the call-girl Alabama Whitman, seeing him for the first time in three years. Clarence convinces his reluctant father to help him evade arrest for the murder of his new wife's former pimp Drexl Spivey by finding out from his former police colleagues if the police knew anything about the murder's perpetrators. Clifford is initially reluctant to help his son, but Clarence persuades the ex-policeman that he had always stood by him, even after the divorce and his neglect as a father, and Clifford ultimately agrees to help him. Clifford finds out that the police believes the murder to be gang-related due to Drexl's ties to "Blue" Lou Boyle, a boss of the mafia, and he tells his son that he is beginning to think that killing Spivey was not a bad idea. Clarence then left him with the phone number of his old friend Dick Ritchie, an actor in Los Angeles with whom he and his wife would be staying for their honeymoon, and politely refuses Clifford's offer of monetary assistance. The security guard then embraces his son and his daughter-in-law as they left for their honeymoon, having redeemed himself after years of poor fathering.
However, it turns out that the mafia discovered Clarence's driver's license on the body of Drexl and held him responsible for the theft of the cocaine, so Boyle's consigliere Vincenzo Coccotti and his henchmen (including Virgil) ambush Clifford when he returns home to his trailer, hitting him and having him sit in a chair as they start to interrogate him. Clifford is uncooperative, leading to Coccotti hitting him in the head and Virgil cutting open one of his palms. Clarence's father swears that he did not know where his son and daughter-in-law were, saying that they had left on honeymoon and not told any details to his torturers. When Coccotti says that Sicilians were the best liars and could easily detect lies, Clifford - seeking a quick death - recounts the story of the Moorish conquest of Sicily to Coccotti and says that the Sicilians were "spawned by n****rs", before asking Coccotti if he was lying. The mobster, who had feigned laughter and amusement the whole time, gives Clifford the traditional kiss of death on his cheek before shooting him dead with a handgun, angered at Worley's insolence and his refusal to cooperate.