Jon Voight collected Oscars and Oscar nominations early in his career. His Joe Buck in “Midnight Cowboy,” Ed Gentry in “Deliverance,” Luke Martin in “Coming Home” and Manny Manheim in “Runaway Train” were acting standards, the sorts of performances that led people such as film scholar David Thomson to call him “easily … one of the best actors of his generation.”

But of late, Voight has become the movies’ Great Impersonator, a gifted actor turning his skills to recreating well-known figures for the movies and TV.

He did Howard Cosell for “Ali,” Pope John Paul II for a recent TV movie, and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt for “Pearl Harbor.”

And he brings legendary Kentucky basketball coach Adolph Rupp back to life for “Glory Road,” the new film about the historic 1966 NCAA Final Four. In the movie, which opened Friday, Voight plays Rupp to star Josh Lucas’s coach Don Haskins in the cultural watershed game, when Rupp’s all-white Kentucky team faced an all-black starting lineup from Texas Western for the championship. And while Lucas looks little like Haskins, Voight went out of his way to replicate the look of the man sports fans remember as “The Baron.”

Jon Voight, left, as Kentucky men's basketball coach Adolph Rupp, and Josh Lucas, as coach of Texas Western, shake hands before the two teams face off in the 1966 NCAA national championship game in Glory

“I have a clean table when I begin,” Voight says of his creative process, “and I start putting things on that table, as they come to me.”

Studying the source

He took on padding, facial and otherwise, to play Rupp. Voight isn’t shy about wearing fake noses, padding, rubber cheeks, etc. “if it takes away the distractions. If it was just me up there, it wouldn’t be as interesting. If the character resembles the guy I’m playing, you just say, ‘Oh, he’s the real deal. Somebody did his homework.”‘

If there’s tape of the person, he listens to it. If there’s film, he studies it. Easy enough to do with a TV star like Cosell, or a TV-Age pope such as John Paul. For Rupp, there was audio tape of his old post-game shows. That helped Voight find Rupp’s Kentucky-inflected Kansas accent (he grew up there).

As for visuals, Voight got lucky. There isn’t that much footage of Rupp off the sidelines. But Voight found a speech Rupp made at a fund-raiser. It helped him mimic Rupp’s walk, his demeanor. “He was this disciplined, shy Mennonite” probably more at home with a room full of people than one-on-one, Voight says. And by the time he was in his 60s, Rupp was a man dismayed by the his sport.

“He was exactly like Joe Paterno,” Voight says, invoking the name of the aged, testy coach of Penn State’s football team. “People thought he was too old to be coaching, that he’d ‘lost a step.’ And then he gets back to the championships with ‘Rupp’s Runts,’ an all-white team of players shorter than most of its competition.”

Not a bigot

What Rupp wasn’t, Voight insists, was the way sports history remembers him: a bigot. Actors can be forgiven for falling in love with their characters, but there’s evidence Rupp may not have been the hardcore segregationist that is his legacy. Sportswriters have claimed to have heard Rupp refer to African-Americans as “coons.” But Louisville Courier-Journal reporter Pat Forde once wrote that while Rupp made a “convenient villain” for the 1966 championship game “morality play,” he saw Rupp as more “an old man anchored in the past.”

“Rupp didn’t have any black players in ’65-66,” Voight says. “But did he try? That’s the main thing. The fact is, he tried to get (Butch) Beard. He tried to get Wes Unseld. And they didn’t want to be the first ones to cross the color line at Kentucky. He didn’t like to beg a kid to come on a scholarship. He was getting pressure from the SEC to integrate. But he didn’t want to recruit a ‘token’ black player. ‘I’m not goin’ to recruit somebody and have’ em sit on the bench.’ That was his ethic.”