James Garner, TV Star (and a pretty good film actor, too)

from WSJ obit:

James Garner of the TV program 'Maverick' arrives at the Emmy Awards with his wife, Lois Clarke, in 1958. Associated Press

James Garner, who died Saturday at the age of 86, was the ultimate affable man of action.

   Although he appeared in over 40 films and was nominated for an Oscar for his star turn in "Murphy's Romance"—a 1985 comedy about a small-town love story in which he co-starred with Sally Field — Mr. Garner made his greatest impact on the small screen, first as the star of the western series "Maverick" and then as detective Jim Rockford on "The Rockford Files."

   He was found dead of natural causes Saturday at his home in the Brentwood area of Los Angeles, police said.

First saw his obit in the Washington Post (James Garner, disarming leading man of film and television):
James Garner, a ruggedly handsome and disarming leading man of film and television who was best known for his series “Maverick” and “The Rockford Files” and who delivered compelling portrayals of wartime cowards, alcoholics and self-centered tycoons, died July 19 at his home in Los Angeles. He was 86.
Los Angeles police confirmed the death to the Associated Press. No immediate cause was reported, but he had a stroke a few years ago.


I loved his role in The Great Escape an all-time favorite film.

He became an actor more or less by accident, when a friend who had become a stage producer got him a nonspeaking role in the Broadway production of "The Caine Mutiny Court Martial." After a few small TV roles, Mr. Garner signed a studio contract with Warner Bros. in 1956. The studio shortened his name and cast him in "Sayonara," an Army romance set in Japan. The film starred Marlon Brando and the two young actors struck up a friendship.
An unlikely duo.

At a time when the networks were crowded with hard-eyed, traditional Western heroes, Bret Maverick provided a fresh breath of air. With his sardonic tone and his eagerness to talk his way out of a squabble rather than pull out his six-shooter, the con-artist Westerner seemed to scoff at the genre's values.

"I don't know what it is about people," he once said in an interview. "They like to see me get whipped."

The series not only launched Mr. Garner, but also helped popularize the word "maverick," which previously was a mainly Texas slang for stray cattle. When Warner's writers went on strike in 1960, the studio stopped paying Mr. Garner, who sued for breach of contract and won.

Mr. Garner returned to television in 1974 in what became his signature role, Jim Rockford—a downtrodden everyman who lived in a mobile home in a parking lot by the beach in Malibu, and took on a new case each week. The series ran six seasons, produced by Mr. Garner's company, and has been in syndication since.

In the late 1980s Mr. Garner sued Universal for $21 million for withholding syndication payments on "Rockford Files." He received an out-of-court settlement.

A real maverick.

An outspoken liberal, Mr. Garner was quoted in news reports as chastising John McCain for calling himself a maverick in his 2008 presidential run. "I never said any of those things," Mr. Garner wrote in his memoir. He added: "But I wish I had."


NYT obit: James Garner, Witty, Handsome Leading Man
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James Garner, the wry and handsome leading man who slid seamlessly between television and the movies but was best known as the amiable gambler Bret Maverick in the 1950s western “Maverick” and the cranky sleuth Jim Rockford in the 1970s series “The Rockford Files,” was found dead of natural causes at his Los Angeles home on Saturday night, the police said. He was 86.

Mr. Garner, who smoked for most of his life, even after open-heart surgery in 1988, had suffered a stroke in 2008.

An understated comic actor, he was especially adept at conveying life’s tiny bedevilments. One of his most memorable roles was as a perpetually flummoxed pitchman for Polaroid cameras in the late 1970s and early 1980s, in droll commercials in which he played a vexed husband and Mariette Hartley played his needling wife. They were so persuasive that Ms. Hartley had a shirt printed with the declaration “I am not Mrs. James Garner.”

“Maverick” had been in part a sendup of the conventional western drama, and “The Rockford Files” similarly made fun of the standard television detective, the man’s man who upholds law and order and has everything under control. A sucker for a pretty girl and with a distinctly ’70s fashion sense — he favored loud houndstooth jackets — Rockford was perpetually wandering into threatening situations in which he ended up pursued by criminal goons or corrupt cops. He tried, mostly successfully, to steer clear of using guns; instead, a bit of a con artist himself, he relied on impersonations and other ruses — and high-speed driving skills.

Every episode of the show, which ran from 1974 to 1980 and more often than not involved at least one car chase and Rockford’s getting beaten up a time or two, began with a distinctive theme song featuring a synthesizer and a blues harmonica and a message coming in on a newfangled gadget — Rockford’s telephone answering machine — that underscored his unheroic existence: “Jim, this is Norma at the market. It bounced. Do you want us to tear it up, send it back or put it with the others?”

In his 2011 autobiography, “The Garner Files,” written with Jon Winokur, Mr. Garner confessed to having a live-and-let-live attitude with the caveat that when he was pushed, he shoved back. What distinguished his performance as Rockford was how well that more-put-upon-than-macho persona came across. Rockford’s reactions — startled, nonplused and annoyed being his specialties — appeared native to him.

His naturalness led John J. O’Connor, writing in The New York Times, to liken Mr. Garner to Gary Cooper and James Stewart. And like those two actors, Mr. Garner usually got the girl.

James Scott Bumgarner was born in Norman, Okla., on April 7, 1928. His paternal grandfather had participated in the Oklahoma land rush of 1889 and was later shot to death by the son of a widow with whom he’d been having an affair. His maternal grandfather was a full-blooded Cherokee. (Mr. Garner would later name his production company Cherokee Productions.)

In 1964 he starred with Julie Andrews in “The Americanization of Emily,” which he called his favorite of all his films. He played the personal attendant of a Navy admiral, a fish out of water and the voice of the movie’s pacifist point of view.

Written by Paddy Chayefsky, it included perhaps the longest and most impassioned speech of his career: “I don’t trust people who make bitter reflections about war, Mrs. Barham,” he said, in part. “It’s always the generals with the bloodiest records who are the first to shout what a hell it is. And it’s always the widows who lead the Memorial Day parades.”

 

Mr. Garner disdained the pretentiousness of the acting profession. “I’m a Methodist but not as an actor,” he wrote in “The Garner Files.” “I’m from the Spencer Tracy school: Be on time, know your words, hit your marks, and tell the truth. I don’t have any theories abut acting, and I don’t think about how to do it, except that an actor shouldn’t take himself too seriously, and shouldn’t try to make acting something it isn’t. Acting is just common sense. It isn’t hard if you put yourself aside and just do what the writer wrote.”

Nor did he sit still for the dog-eat-dog business side of Hollywood. In the early 1980s he again sued his employer, this time Universal, which he accused of cheating him out of his share of profits on “The Rockford Files.” Universal settled the case in 1989, reportedly paying him more than $14 million.