[4] Although his parents' families had both long been in Texas, Beaver was born in Laramie, as his father was doing graduate work in accounting at the University of Wyoming.

[5] Returning to Texas, Beaver Sr. worked as an accountant and as a minister for the Church of Christ in Fort Worth, Crowley, Dallas, and Grapevine.

[6] He and his three younger sisters (Denise, Reneé, and Teddlie) all attended Irving High School, where he was a classmate of ZZ Top drummer Frank Beard,[7] but he transferred in his senior year to Fort Worth Christian Academy, from which he graduated in 1968.

Upon his release from active duty in 1971, Beaver returned to Irving, and worked briefly for Frito-Lay as a corn-chip dough mixer.

He performed in numerous plays in college and supported himself as a cabdriver, a movie projectionist, a tennis-club maintenance man, and an amusement-park stuntman at Frontier City.

Moving to New York City in 1979, Beaver worked steadily onstage in stock and on tour, simultaneously writing plays and researching a biography of actor George Reeves.

He appeared in starring roles in such plays as The Hasty Heart and The Rainmaker in Birmingham, Alabama, and The Lark in Manchester, New Hampshire, and toured the country as Macduff in Macbeth and in The Last Meeting of the Knights of the White Magnolia.

Following a reading of his play Verdigris, he was asked to join the prestigious Theatre West company in Hollywood, where he continues as an actor and playwright to this day.

He immediately began to work writing episodes of television series including Alfred Hitchcock Presents (he received a 1987 CableACE Award nomination for his very first TV script for this show), Tour of Duty and Vietnam War Story.

Subsequently, he has appeared in many popular films, including Sister Act, Sliver, Bad Girls, Adaptation., Magnolia, and The Life of David Gale.

He starred in the television series Thunder Alley as the comic sidekick to Ed Asner, and as homicide cop Earl Gaddis on Reasonable Doubts.

In 2002, Beaver was cast as one of the stars of the ensemble Western drama Deadwood in the role of Whitney Ellsworth, a goldminer whom he often described as "Gabby Hayes with Tourette syndrome".

He recurred as the gun dealer Lawson on Breaking Bad and its prequel Better Call Saul, and played Sheriff Shelby Parlow for three seasons on FX's Justified.

His memoir about the year after his wife's 2003 lung cancer diagnosis, titled Life's That Way, was purchased in a preemptive bid by Putnam/Penguin publishers in the fall of 2007.

In June, 2016, Beaver returned to the Festival to play Big Daddy in Tennessee Williams's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

President Robert "Dakota Bob" Singer on the Amazon series The Boys, produced by Eric Kripke, creator of Supernatural.

[18] For several years after his 1983 move to California, Beaver shared a house with character actor Hank Worden, whom he considered a close friend and surrogate grandfather.