James Garner 1928-2014

[Zoneboy]

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Amiable actor James Garner, whose moderately successful film career was eclipsed by two extraordinarily popular television series, “Maverick” and “The Rockford Files,” has died, according to reports. He was 86.

Like many popular leading men of Hollywood’s heyday, Garner boasted all-American good looks and a winning personality that carried him through comedy and drama alike. He was one of the first of TV’s leading men to cross over into films in the ’60s with such popular movies as “The Thrill of It All” and “The Americanization of Emily.” But he had his greatest impact in television, first on “Maverick” in the ’50s and then in the ’70s on “The Rockford Files,” for which he won an Emmy in 1977. He later appeared in several quality telepics including “Promise,” “My Name Is Bill W.” and “Barbarians at the Gate,” as well as the occasional strong feature such as “Victor/Victoria” and “Murphy’s Romance,” for which he captured his sole Oscar nomination for lead actor.

Garner won two Emmys and racked up a total of 15 nominations.

Garner found his way to showbiz through a friend, theater producer Paul Gregory: He was employed cueing actor Lloyd Nolan during rehearsals of the Broadway-bound “The Caine Mutiny Court Martial.” Garner eventually copped a nonspeaking role in the 1954 production, where, he said, he closely studied the play’s star, Henry Fonda. After studying with Herbert Berghof, Garner landed a role in the touring production of “Caine.”

Back in Los Angeles in 1955, he secured bit parts in the TV series “Cheyenne.” Impressed, Warner Bros. gave him a screen test and a contract at $200 a week. He paid his dues in supporting roles in “Towards the Unknown,” “The Girl He Left Behind” and “Shootout at Medicine Bend” as well as some TV assignments.

He was first really noticeable in a role as Marlon Brando’s pal in “Sayonara,” after which he was assigned a supporting role in “Darby’s Rangers.” When “Darby’s” lead Charlton Heston walked off the film, Garner inherited his first starring role, but reviews were mixed.

The real boost to his career came in a role now indelibly associated with him, that of Bret Maverick in the comedic Western that ABC debuted in 1957; the role and the series fit his wry personality like a glove. Originally the story was to alternate between the Maverick brothers played by Garner and Jack Kelly, but “Maverick” quickly became all about Garner’s character, who used his wits to get out of trouble. Other actors revolved in and out including Clint Eastwood as a vicious gunfighter. “Maverick” led to a long relationship between Garner and its creator, Roy Huggins. The actor stayed with the series until 1960, when he quit over a dispute with Warners.

“I’m playing me,” Garner said about the role. “Bret Maverick is lazy: I’m lazy. And I like being lazy.”

Lazy or not, the actor shared the Golden Globe for most promising male newcomer in 1958 and earned his first Emmy nomination in 1959 for “Maverick.”

In the meantime, Warners was serving him frustrating fare like “Up Periscope” and “Cash McCall.” Taking advantage of a suspension during the Writers Guild strike of 1960, Garner sued Warners for breach of contract — and won — allowing him to be a free agent and demand more for his services.

He appeared in specials and toured in summer stock before landing a supporting role in “The Children’s Hour” with Shirley MacLaine and Audrey Hepburn.

His roles in films got better: “Boys’ Night Out” and, especially, “The Great Escape” brought him his best notices. He said that he drew on his experience in the Korean War, during which he was the company scrounger, for the latter role.

For a time he seemed ready to inherit the aging Cary Grant’s romantic comedy leading man mantle with such films as “The Thrill of It All” (1963), “The Wheeler Dealers” and “Move Over Darling.” Blake Edwards gave him a meatier assignment, in the satire “The Americanization of Emily,” opposite the then-red-hot Julie Andrews. He then nabbed the thriller “36 Hours” and a couple of indifferent comedies, “The Art of Love” and “A Man Could Get Killed.”

The films were now A-budget, but “Duel at Diablo,” “Mr. Buddwing” and “Grand Prix,” which gave him a yen for car racing, were hardly first rate.

Except for a couple of Westerns including “Hour of the Gun” (in which he played Wyatt Earp), Garner was stuck in films that did not find much success, such as “They Only Kill Their Masters,” “Marlowe” and “Skin Game.” He took cover in television, where after the brief NBC Western series “Nichols” in 1971, he hit paydirt with comedic detective skein “The Rockford Files,” which ran from 1974-80 and won him an Emmy in 1977 and another four nominations.

Huggins teamed with Stephen J. Cannell for the detective series recycling many of the plots from “Maverick.” Many of Garner’s friends had recurring roles in the series, including Joe Santos and Stuart Margolin as his buddies. Margolin said at the time that Garner worked long shifts, did his own stunts and stayed to do off-camera lines for the other cast members. But his old injuries and pay disputes led Garner to call it quits even though the show drew high ratings on NBC.

He again essayed “Bret Maverick” for one season in 1981. But a bad back, lawsuits with MCA TV over “Rockford” syndication payments (he eventually settled, reportedly for several million dollars) and, eventually, heart surgery curtailed his ability to endure the rigors of a TV series. By then, however, he was a household name, and one which audiences would follow to the theater, provided the vehicle wasn’t a turkey like “H.E.A.L.T.H.” or “The Fan.”

Fortunately, Edwards and Andrews called on him again in the musical “Victor/Victoria” in 1982, and he landed a plum role opposite Sally Field in the comedy/romance “Murphy’s Romance” in 1985. He essayed an older Wyatt Earp in Edwards’ “Sunset” opposite Bruce Willis as Tom Mix and did the underwhelming “Fire in the Sky” in 1983. In 1994 he took a small role in the bigscreen version of “Maverick,” with Mel Gibson in the lead, giving the star a run for his money in the likability department.

In 1996 he starred as an ex-president opposite Jack Lemmon in “My Fellow Americans.” The best of his later work, however, came in television in such TV movie dramas as “Heartsounds” with Mary Tyler Moore in 1984, directed by Glen Jordan, who also guided him through “Promise” in 1986. In 1989 he was acclaimed for “My Name Is Bill W.” with James Woods. In the 1992 HBO film “Barbarians at the Gate,” the actor offered up a standout chewy performance. Quieter, but no less effective, was “Breathing Lessons” opposite Joanne Woodward.

His bigscreen career continued in the 2000s with the Clint Eastwood-helmed veteran astronaut comedy “Space Cowboys,” chick pic “Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood” and 2004 hit tearjerker “The Notebook,” in which Garner and Gena Rowlands played the older versions of a couple portrayed by Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams.

On the smallscreen, Garner recurred on the ABC comedy “8 Simple Rules for Dating My Daughter” from 2003-05. He also voiced God for the short-lived NBC series “God, the Devil and Bob,” played the chief justice in CBS’ Supreme Court drama “First Monday” and portrayed Mark Twain in a 2002 Hallmark adaptation of Twain’s novel “Roughing It.”

NBC was developing a new version of “The Rockford Files” in recent years but was not happy with the result, and in April 2012, sister company Universal announced a bigscreen adaptation that would star Vince Vaughn as Rockford. The project is still in development and undergoing a rewrite from novelist Chuck Hogan.

James Bumgarner interrupted his high school education in Norman, Okla., to become a merchant seaman before moving to Los Angeles, enrolling at Hollywood High and then returning to Norman, where he joined the Oklahoma State National Guard.

He briefly went to work in his father’s carpeting business in Los Angeles until being called for duty in the Korean War. He served more than a year in the Korean peninsula and was awarded the Purple Heart before his discharge in 1952. He studied business administration at the U. of Oklahoma but left after a semester to wander and take on a variety of odd jobs.

Garner starred with Mariette Hartley in a series of noted commercials for Polaroid in the 1970s.

He won the Screen Actors Guild’s Life Achievement Award in 2005.

Garner is survived by his wife, the former Lois Clarke, to whom he was married since 1956; daughter Greta “Gigi” Garner; and an adopted daughter, Kimberly, from Clarke’s first marriage.

[Skywalker]

R.I.P. James Garner.

[Bonniegirl]

He was a cool guy! He was liked by guys cause he was so darn cool! And liked by women because he was so darn handsome (and cool)!


RIP Jim!

[yasdnil]

R.I.P., James.

Another article:

James Garner Dies
By Stephen M. Silverman
07/20/2014 at 05:00 AM EDT

James Garner, for more than 50 years one of Hollywood's most likable leading men on the big screen and on TV, died at his Los Angeles home Saturday night, reports TMZ. He was 86.

The star, best known for the Maverick and The Rockford Files TV series, had suffered what had been described as a minor stroke in 2008.

Besides his popular work on the small screen, Garner also appeared opposite Julie Andrews in two critically acclaimed movies, 1964's The Americanization of Emily and 1982's Victor/Victoria. In addition, he costarred opposite Doris Day in The Thrill of It All and Move Over, Darling (both 1963), and added his own charm to perhaps one of the greatest buddy movies of all time, 1963's The Great Escape, with Steve McQueen.

Another box-office hit was the 1966 racing film Grand Prix, which put him in widescreen Cinerama.

Besides appearing as an aged astronaut with Clint Eastwood in 2000's Space Cowboys, Garner had later roles in the 2004 film The Notebook and as Katey Sagal's father on the ABC sitcom 8 Simple Rules.

Dickensian Childhood
Born James Scott Bumgarner in Norman, Okla., the future star had a childhood that played like a modern day Oliver Twist. He was only 5 when his mother died, and he and his two brothers were farmed out to various relatives.

Three years later the family was reunited when their father, Weldon (who subsequently married four times), introduced them to their first stepmother, a mean-spirited woman who regularly beat them.

"Mostly me," Garner told PEOPLE in 1985 – the same year he received a Best Actor Oscar nomination for Murphy's Romance, with Sally Field.

"My dad worked hard as an upholsterer and carpet layer," said Garner, "but he was a rake and he drank a lot. He'd come home bombed and make us sing to him or get a whipping."

From that experience, Garner developed a lifelong sympathy for the underdog. "I cannot stand to see little people picked on by big people," he said. "If a director starts abusing people, I'll just jump in."

At 14, he left home and did odd jobs. Two years later he lied about his age and joined the merchant marine, but left in less than a year.

Drifting to L.A., Garner attended Hollywood High, where he developed into a football hero – only to prove shy off the field.

"All the girls liked him," said a childhood friend, "but Jim hardly dated."

Male Model
Still, Garner's hunky teen torso won him his first on-camera job: a Jantzen swimsuit ad – something he later regretted. "Ever since I did that darn ad, I've hated having my picture taken," he said.

The Korean War interrupted his modeling career. He was wounded twice and won two Purple Hearts. "I wasn't a hero," he said modestly. "I just got in the way a lot."

It was also luck, he claimed, that got him into acting. A pal from back home who'd become a producer gave him the small role of a judge in Broadway's The Caine Mutiny Court Martial. The star of the show, Henry Fonda, became his model and mentor.

Warner Bros. made Garner a contract player, which led, in 1957, to his starring as the shy Western hero on Maverick – at the bargain price of $500 a week. After four years he sued and got out of his contact.

Litigation also surrounded his departure from Rockford in 1979, after five years on the show. He claimed all the stunts ruined his health – and the studio's bookkeeping cheated him out of millions in profits. (After a 10-year legal battle, Universal and Garner settled their financial dispute out of court.)

On a happier note, in 1956 he met aspiring actress Lois Clarke at a Democratic rally, and, he said, "She just knocked me out." Two weeks later they were married.

Already the mother of a daughter, Kim, by a former marriage, Lois had another daughter with Garner, Gigi. All three women survive him.

http://www.people.com/article/james-garner-dies

[AB]

Rest in peace.

[Bonniegirl]

MeTV just started showing the Rockford Files a few weeks ago. I saw it a couple weeks ago when I was home sick from work, and now just today hearing of his passing!

[TMC]

http://time.com/3009311/james-garner/

Garner’s roles on “The Rockford Files” and “Maverick” "got through trouble with cleverness, charm and subtle wit,” says James Poniewozik. "James Garner wasn’t the kind of star who won love because he seemed so elevated above you: he made you love him by showing you that he was on your level–had in fact spent some time down in the dirt, brushed off the dust, and moved on with a rascally smile.” PLUS: “Rockford Files” was the perfect marriage of storytellers, star and genre.
Read more at http://www.hitfix.com/tv-tattle#gqcCxuoOOFfkb4vW.99

[Zoneboy]

Link

There are actors who become stars because they strike awe — because they’re imposing, powerful, monumental. And then there was James Garner.


Garner, who died Saturday night of natural causes at age 86, was no toothpick of a man — he was a former high school football and basketball player who kept his rugged, weathered good looks long into life. But the characters he became famous for, especially TV’s Bret Maverick and Jim Rockford, won you over with their minds. They got through trouble with cleverness, charm and subtle wit. Garner wasn’t the kind of star who won love because he seemed so elevated above you: he made you love him by showing you that he was on your level — had in fact spent some time down in the dirt, brushed off the dust, and moved on with a rascally smile.

Born James Scott Bumgarner in Norman, Okla., in 1928, Garner had experience rebounding from tough times early in life. His mother died when he was small, and his father remarried a woman who Garner would later recall was physically abusive. His family moved around the West, eventually settling in Los Angeles, where — after a stint in the Korean War — he was discovered for the movies.

The handsome Garner was a natural for westerns and war pictures and adventure movies. But the characters that proved the best fit for his natural, easygoing charm were anything but typical screen stars. He came of age as an actor in the heyday of the TV western, not by playing an upstanding lawman but as the wily, disarming card shark Bret Maverick in the action-comedy Maverick, a gambler and ladies’ man who had the fastest mind in the West.

Debuting in 1957, Maverick was a character ahead of his time in spirit, a forerunner of the little-guy heroes, the roguish, antiauthoritarians who would rule movies and TV in the 1970s. You can see a little bit of a proto–Bill Murray in the dry, sly Maverick, and if Star Wars had been made 20 years earlier, Garner would have been your Han Solo hands down. Garner stayed off TV for a decade after Maverick, but he had a great run in the movies in the 1960s, drama and comedy alike. (Support Your Local Sheriff! would be a great catch-up watch for anyone wanting to discover, or rediscover, his work.)

Garner’s most famous role, as Jim Rockford in The Rockford Files in 1974, was the perfect meeting of Garner’s talents and the spirit of the age. Like Bret Maverick, Rockford was a screen-hero archetype who became all the bigger for being cut down to size: a private detective who’d spent time in jail on a bad rap, always one step ahead of the bill collectors and one good night’s sleep shy of his peak. He was not a pressed suit; he was a rumpled jacket that could use a dry cleaning. And that was what made him wear so comfortably.

The Rockford Files was a crime show where the characters were finally more important than the action: it had its share of brawls and car spinouts, but you really tuned in for the ping-pong dialogue between Rockford and con man Angel or his dad Rocky. (It was a precursor of the more character-based dramas of today’s cable-dominated TV era, and in fact the show was one of the first writing jobs for David Chase of The Sopranos.) Rockford might get his man in the end, but what made him loveable was less his triumphs than his ability to roll with defeat. He could throw a punch if he had to, but what made him a hero was his ability to take one.

I was too young for the run of the original Maverick, but I relished the brief-lived revival, Bret Maverick, in 1981, and I caught Rockford both in its original run and reruns. As a nerdy, not-too-athletic kid, I was especially drawn to pop-culture trickster figures — Bugs Bunny, Hawkeye Pierce, scoundrels who outwitted their rivals instead of outfighting them. Jim Rockford was the only TV crime fighter I really cared about, a charmer who could indeed win for losing.

I got older, and so did Garner, but he kept working late into life — collecting an Oscar nomination in 1985 for Murphy’s Romance, making a return to TV in 2004 on 8 Simple Rules after the sudden death of John Ritter. But Rockford lingered somewhere in my mind, and I suspect the minds of a lot of TV fans from that era. Garner created him as a sunny, fundamentally decent example of how to get through frustrations and disappointments not with rage, but a wry comeback.

In the end, charm and humor wear more comfortably than rage and drama. Audiences love that kind of character. Fate loves that kind of character. If you need a quick thumbnail philosophy for living, it would not be a terrible one to simply remember to ask yourself, whenever you face adversity, “What would Jim Rockford do?” For posing that question, and giving it such an entertaining answer, thank you James Garner, and RIP.

[biffbronson]

Originally Posted by bonniegirl62

MeTV just started showing the Rockford Files a few weeks ago. I saw it a couple weeks ago when I was home sick from work, and now just today hearing of his passing!

Actually MeTV has been airing The Rockford Files for a long time now, a couple of years easily I believe -- though they did change the time at least once.

[king of comedy]

Another great actor gone. R.I.P. James Garner

[Steve_uk]

I first encountered James Garner playing Jim Rockford,a private detective who lived in a Malibu trailer park with his dad and whose voice one heard on an answerphone in the opening credits in the late 1970s,when the show aired on a Thursday night on the BBC. It was an iconic show along with so many of those from that decade,including The Streets of San Francisco,Columbo,Hawaii Five-0,Barnaby Jones and Ironside. I could still watch the reruns were they available and these imports are almost enough to forgive America its foreign policy mistakes down the years..

[king of comedy]

He should have gotten a Kennedy Center Honor.

[KurtPikachu2001]

Very saddened by this news. Did anyone know one of his favorite charities was animal shelters? Hope MeTV and TCM do a tribute to him.

Loved him in Westerns, Rockford Files, Great Escape, and everything he did was just very impressive.

RIP James Garner, you will be missed.