Clarence Gilyard Jr, a popular supporting actor whose credits include the blockbuster films Die Hard and Top Gun and the hit television series Walker, Texas Ranger, has died at the age of 66.

His death was announced this week by the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where he taught stage and screen acting.

Gilyard had suffered from a long illness. However, additional details about his death were not immediately available on Tuesday (US time).

“Professor Gilyard was a beacon of light and strength for everyone around him at UNLV,” the school’s film chair, Heather Addison, said in a statement.

“Whenever we asked him how he was, he would cheerfully declare that he was ‘blessed’. But we are truly the ones who were blessed to be his colleagues and students for so many years.”

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Gilyard had a prolific career as an actor, starting in the 1980s. He dropped out of college to take a role in TV’s Diff’rent Strokes, followed by The Facts of Life and other shows.

His big TV break came in 1989 when he landed the role of Conrad McMasters on NBC’s Matlock opposite a boyhood hero in Andy Griffith.

“Andy could have chosen any one of a thousand guys to be his partner for four seasons and he chose me,” Gilyard told the Las Vegas Review-Journal in 2017.

“Andy was funny and a raconteur and a craftsman. I don’t think I was funny before him. He would teach me comic timing.”

He then appeared in two of the biggest movies of the decade: Top Gun, in which he played Sundown, a radar intercept officer; and Die Hard, when he was featured as a villainous computer thief whose one liners included “You didn’t bring me along for my charming personality”.

In the 1990s, he was on the side of law enforcement in Matlock, playing opposite Andy Griffith, and Walker, Texas Ranger, which starred Chuck Norris.

His other credits include The Karate Kid: Part II, a stage production of Driving Miss Daisy.

Gilyard quit acting in 2006 to start teaching at UNLV and directing productions at the university’s Nevada Conservatory Theatre.

“I’m wired to teach. And I’m a professional, but the profession has to feed the classroom. It’s what stimulates my characters because I’m in touch with people’s lives in the 21st century,” he told the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

UNLV theater professor Nate Bynum said some might be surprised that Gilyard “valued his appointment as a university professor as highly, maybe higher, than his illustrious career as a TV star”.

“It was a major goal for him. He loved … the students he instructed in his classroom. Gone too soon,” he said.

Gilyard did make a brief return to the screen in 2021 – reuniting with Bruce Willis and De’voreaux White for a DieHard battery commercial.

-with AAP