James Garner
James Garner (born on
April 7,
1928) is an
American film and
television actor of partially
Cherokee Indian descent. He starred in several
television series that spanned a career of five decades, including his roles as Bret Maverick in the popular
1950s
western-
comedy series,
Maverick, and as Jim Rockford in the popular
1970s
crime drama,
The Rockford Files, and made dozens of movies, including the classics
The Great Escape (1963) and
Paddy Chayefsky's
The Americanization of Emily (1964). Towards the end of his acting career, he recently played the father of (
Katey Sagal) on
8 Simple Rules after the death of
John Ritter. Toward the end of April 2006, Garner returned to his hometown for a short visit. While there the city unveiled a ten foot bronze cast statue of Garner as
Bret Maverick placed downtown, named a street after him, and dubbed the downtown Main Street area the James Garner corridor. The Norman Public School System also awarded Garner with an honorary High School diploma.
An Okie in Korea
Garner was born
James Scott Bumgarner in
Norman, Oklahoma to Weldon Warren Bumgarner and Mildred Meek. After an endless number of early bad jobs, he joined the
Merchant Marine at 16. He was later in the
National Guard before being drafted into the
Korean War, where he received a
Purple Heart.
After modeling Jantzen bathing suits in print ads, in
1954 Garner had a non-speaking role in the
Broadway production of
The Caine Mutiny Court Martial, where he watched
Henry Fonda at close quarters night after night. He subsequently moved on to
television commercials and eventually to television roles. His first movie appearances were in
The Girl He Left Behind and
Toward the Unknown in 1956.
Maverick
After four supporting feature film roles, including the smash-hit
Sayonara with
Marlon Brando, he got his big break when he starred in a stunningly popular comedy-Western series,
Maverick, playing the role of professional gambler Bret Maverick from 1957 to 1960. No one but Garner and series creator
Roy Huggins thought the series could compete with
The Ed Sullivan Show and
The Steve Allen Show, but
Maverick quickly became a national sensation, making Garner a household name almost immediately at the age of 29. With the arguable exception of the movie
The Great Escape, Garner was never again involved with a project that generated as much public and media obsession.
Various actors had recurring roles as Maverick foils, including
Efrem Zimbalist, Jr as "Dandy Jim Buckley" and
Richard Long as "Gentleman Jack Darby," and the series veered effortlessly from comedy to adventure and back again. The relationship with Huggins, the creator and original producer of
Maverick, would later pay dividends for Garner.
Garner was originally sole star of
Maverick (for the first seven episodes) but production demands forced the studio,
Warner Bros., to create a second Maverick brother, Bart, played by
Jack Kelly. This move allowed two production units to film episodes simultaneously (the series also featured extremely popular cross-over episodes with both Maverick brothers). Critics marvelled at Garner and Kelly's extraordinary chemistry in their episodes together, but Garner quit the series in the third season in a dispute with Warner Bros.
The studio attempted to replace Garner with a Maverick cousin who had lived in Britain long enough to pick up an English accent, played by an eventual movie
James Bond,
Roger Moore, but Moore quit the series due to a decline in script quality after only 15 episodes, insisting that if he'd gotten stories like Garner's earlier ones, he would have stayed. Warner Bros. also dressed
Robert Colbert, a Garner look-alike, in Bret Maverick's outfit and called the character Brent, but Brent Maverick did not catch on with viewers and Colbert made only two episodes toward the end of the season, leaving the rest of the series' run to Kelly (alternating with reruns of episodes with Garner).
In
2004, Garner became one of the first three honorees in the
World Poker Tour Walk of Fame for his portrayal of Maverick.
Major 1960s movie career
In the
1960s he starred in such films as
The Thrill of It All and
Move Over, Darling, both with
Doris Day,
Boys' Night Out with
Kim Novak and
Tony Randall,
The Great Escape,
The Americanization of Emily with
Julie Andrews and
James Coburn,
The Art of Love with
Dick Van Dyke and
Elke Sommer, and
Support Your Local Sheriff! with
Walter Brennan.
The hugely lavish flop
Grand Prix (film) gave him a fascination with car racing, while permanently damaging his movie career. Unlike
Paul Newman and
Steve McQueen, he never did well in major
sports car racing events.
The Americanization of Emily, an extremely literate anti-war D-Day comedy, featured an exquisitely written script by
Paddy Chayefsky and always remained Garner's favorite of all his own work.
The Great Escape was a towering cultural milestone, but Garner played only second lead, supporting fellow ex-TV series cowboy
Steve McQueen. As of
July 2006, he is one of only three surviving stars of the film, the others being
Lord Attenborough and
David McCallum.
In 1969 Garner joined a long line of actors to play
Raymond Chandler's creation, Phillip Marlowe, in
Marlowe. Chandler had always written the character while visualizing
Cary Grant in the role (not an unusual occurrence for a writer), but Grant never accepted the part.
Dick Powell,
Humphrey Bogart,
Robert Mitchum, and even
Elliot Gould each took a turn at it, but only Garner's version features
Bruce Lee dropping by his office to smash everything into pieces with karate chops.
Nichols
In 1971, Garner returned to television in an extremely offbeat western called
Nichols. The character proved so unorthodox that the network had him killed, with Garner showing up as the character's more normal twin brother at the end of the season, but then the series was cancelled. It was Garner's favorite TV series outing, but was almost as unpopular as
Maverick had been sensationally successful. In the last episode Garner had Nichols killed so that a sequel could not be filmed.
|
February 1975TV Guide cover featuring James Garner |
The Rockford Files
In the
1970s Roy Huggins had an idea to redo
Maverick, but this time in the form of a modern-day private detective. Huggins teamed with co-creator and eventual TV icon
Stephen J. Cannell, and the pair tapped Garner to attempt to re-kindle the phenomenal success of
Maverick, actually recycling many of the plots from the original series. Starting with the
1974 television season, Garner was back on television as
private investigator Jim Rockford in
The Rockford Files. For six seasons, the inspired and iconoclastic scripts stood Garner in good stead and many consider Rockford his best role. He received an
Emmy Award for Best Actor in
1977.
Bearish actor
Noah Beery, Jr., nephew of screen legend
Wallace Beery, played Rockford's father, and there was a surprising physical resemblance between Garner and Beery, while
Gretchen Corbett played Rockford's lawyer and sometime lover until she left the series over a salary dispute with the studio. In addition, Garner also invited yet another familiar actor
Joe Santos who played Rockford's friend in the
LAPD, and a man with whom he'd had a love/hate relationship. Like Beery, Garner also had a close bond with Santos, over the years, and in later years, his co-star was concerned about the star's health, as well. And rounding out the cast was
Stuart Margolin, a friend of Garner's, who previously co-starred with him on
Nichols, played Jim's ex-cellmate and shifty friend, in a recurring role of Angel Martin. Overall, the cast and crew had a close relationship with Garner, on and off the set.
Critics delighted in pointing out that
The Rockford Files took iconoclasm to new heights, with almost everyone in authority being mean-spirited, wrong-headed, and just plain stupid, out to make Rockford's life as unremittingly miserable as they possibly could. The witty dialogue crackled with intense humor;
The Rockford Files was at least as much comedy as drama.
Garner pulled the plug on the show, despite consistent ratings, because it was taking too much of a physical toll on his body. Appearing in practically every frame of film, doing many of his own stunts — including one that injured his back — was wearing him out. A knee injury that he had received in the National Guard was worsening in the wake of the continuous jumping and rolling. He was also hospitalized with a bleeding ulcer in
1979, some years before the cure for ulcers was discovered. Between his knee, back, and ulcer, he was done: Garner looked frighteningly unhealthy in what turned out to be the last episode of the series, "Deadlock in Parma," with the look on his face of a dying man.
Critics agreed that
The Rockford Files had featured some of the very best writing ever presented on television.
Bret Maverick At 53
After a rest, Garner returned to his most popular TV role in 1981 with the television revival series
Bret Maverick, but NBC unexpectedly cancelled the show after only one season despite reasonably good ratings. Critics noted that most of the scripts didn't begin to measure up to the first series, although Garner's performance as a 53-year-old Bret Maverick was almost universally applauded.
Jack Kelly (Bart Maverick) was going to become a series regular had the series been picked up for another season, and appeared in the last scene of the final episode as a surprise.
Garner had also played Bret Maverick in the TV-movie
The New Maverick in 1978 and for one scene at the beginning of the short-lived series
Young Maverick the following year.
Top-Quality TV-Movies
During the
1980s, he played mainly dramatic roles, starring in a number of
TV movies, from
Heartsounds (with
Mary Tyler Moore) to
Promise (also starring
Piper Laurie) and
My Name is Bill W.. Garner was nominated for his 1st
Oscar award, for
Best Actor in a Leading Role in the movie
Murphy's Romance, opposite
Sally Field. Field had to fight the studio to get Garner cast since he was regarded as a TV name by that point. In
1988 Garner underwent emergency quintuple
heart bypass surgery due to his excessive smoking. Though he rapidly recovered, the doctors insisted that he stop smoking. In 1993, he played the lead in another well-received TV-movie,
Barbarians at the Gate, and went on to reprise his role as Jim Rockford in eight
The Rockford Files made-for-TV
movies, beginning the following year. The frenetic opening theme song from the original series was rerecorded and slowed to a funereal pace, and practically everyone in the original cast of recurring characters returned for the new outings (except Beery, who had died in the interim and appeared only in the two-dimensional form of a photograph on Rockford's desk).
Man of the People
In 1991 Garner starred in "Man of the People", a show about a con man who is chosen to fill an empty seat on a city council. Garner plays 'Jim Doyle' who is a small time grifter and whose ex-wife is a city councilwoman who passes away unexpectedly.
Kate Mulgrew who plays Mayor Lisbeth Chardin has to suggest someone to fill in the vacant seat until the next election and selects Jim Doyle thinking that he would be easy to manipulate. Jim figures things out quick and soon becomes a "Man of the People" and starts using his style of political manuvering (con games). This show is basically "Maverick" in modern politics. It was more funny than the average drama but more serious than a sitcom, falling somewhere in between. Despite good ratings it was cancelled after airing only 10 episodes but 2 additional ones were filmed. Also cast were;
Romy Walthall as Rita George Wyner as Art Lurie Corinne Bohrer as Constance Leroy Taylor Nichols as Richard Lawrence
Wyatt Earp
Garner played
Wyatt Earp, whom he physically resembled to judge from Earp's photographs, in two very different movies shot 21 years apart,
Hour of the Gun in 1967 and
Sunset in 1988. The first film was a realistic depiction of the OK Corral shootout and its aftermath, while the second was a fictionalization of Earp's much later relationship with silent movie cowboy star
Tom Mix, featuring
Bruce Willis as Mix in his second movie role. Although Willis was billed over Garner, the film actually gave more screen time and the most emphasis to Earp rather than Mix.
Malcolm McDowell played a villainous silent comedian.
In 1994 Garner played an Earp-like role as "Marshal Zane Cooper" in a movie version of
Maverick, with
Mel Gibson as Bret Maverick and
Jodie Foster as a gambling lass with a fake southern accent based on a character played in the TV series by
Diane Brewster.
In 1995 Garner played lead character Woodrow Call, an ex-lawman, in the TV miseries sequel to
Lonesome Dove,
Streets of Laredo, based on
Larry McMurtry's book. Garner had been offered
Robert Duvall's role in the original miniseries but had to turn it down for health reasons, and eventually wound up playing the part first portrayed by
Tommy Lee Jones instead.
Later Work In TV & Movies
In 1996 Garner and
Jack Lemmon, critically regarded as the two best American light comedians of their generation, finally teamed up in
My Fellow Americans, playing two former presidents on the run together.
In addition to a major recurring role during the last part of the run of TV series
Chicago Hope, he also starred in a couple of short-lived series, the animated
God, the Devil and Bob and
First Monday, in which he played a Supreme Court justice.
In 2000, after an operation to replace both knees, Garner appeared with
Clint Eastwood (who'd played a villain in the original
Maverick series) in the movie
Space Cowboys, also featuring
Tommy Lee Jones and
Donald Sutherland. During a mass appearance by the cast on television's
The Tonight Show with
Jay Leno, Leno ran a brief clip from Garner and Eastwood's lengthy saloon fistfight during Eastwood's
Maverick appearance over forty years earlier.
Upon the death of
John Ritter in 2003, Garner joined the cast of
8 Simple Rules as Grandpa Egan (Cate's father). Originally intended to be a one-shot guest role, he stayed with the series until its end.
In 2004 Garner starred in the movie version of
Nicholas Spark's The Notebook alongside
Gena Rowlands as his wife (played in flashbacks by
Rachel McAdams), directed by
Nick Cassavetes, Rowlands' son.
The Tall Dark Stranger
For his contribution to the film and television industry, Garner received a star on the
Hollywood Walk of Fame (6927 Hollywood Blvd). In 1990, he was inducted into the
Western Performers Hall of Fame at the
National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in
Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. On
9 February 2005 he received the
Screen Actor's Guild Lifetime Achievement Award; when
Morgan Freeman won an acting award that Garner was also up for that night, he affectionately led the delighted audience in a lively sing-along of the original
Maverick theme song, written by
David Buttolph and
Paul Francis Webster:
Who is the tall dark stranger there?
Maverick is his name.
Riding the trail to who-knows-where
Luck is his companion
Gamblin' is his game.
Smooth as the handle on a gun.
Maverick is his name.
Wild as the wind in Oregon
Blowin' up a canyon/ Easier to tame.
Riverboat ring your bell.
Fare-thee-well Annabelle.
Luck is the lady that he loves the best.
Natchez to New Orleans.
Livin' on jacks and queens.
Maverick is the legend of the west.
On April 21, 2006, a ten-foot tall statue of James Garner as
Bret Maverick was unveiled in Garner's hometown of Norman, Oklahoma, with Garner present at the ceremony.
Quote from James Garner:
"Marriage is like the Army; everyone complains, but you'd be surprised at the large number of people who re-enlist." [Garner himself never had to re-enlist, however, since he stayed with his first wife.]
Garner is a devout Democrat. For his role in the 1985 CBS miniseries "Space", the character was changed from a Republican (as in the book) to reflect Garner's personal tastes. Also, on an episode of The Tonight Show with Jay Leno airing 20 January 2005, Garner was promoting "The Notebook" when he said what a bad day it was because George W. Bush was being sworn in for a second term that day. However, Garner also pointed out that his best friend is a Republican. Garner makes no apologies for his liberal philosophy, telling interviewer Charlie Rose, late in his life, "I'm a card-carrying liberal."
Garner was a contributor to off-road racing as the owner of the
American Motors Team. [
1] He helped launch the career of off-road legend
Walker Evans. He was inducted in the
Off-road Motorsports Hall of Fame in 1976. [
2]
*
1956 Toward the Unknown * 1956
The Girl He Left Behind *
1957 Shoot-Out at Medicine Bend* 1957
Sayonara *
1958 Darby's Rangers *
1959 Up Periscope* 1959
Alias Jesse James (uncredited)
*
1960 Cash McCall*
1961 The Children's Hour*
1962 Boys' Night Out *
1963 The Great Escape* 1963
The Thrill of It All* 1963
The Wheeler Dealers* 1963
Move Over, Darling*
1964 The Americanization of Emily*
1965 36 Hours* 1965
The Art of Love*
1966 A Man Could Get Killed* 1966
Duel at Diablo * 1966
Mister Buddwing* 1966
Grand Prix*
1967 Hour of the Gun*
1968 How Sweet It Is!* 1968
The Pink Jungle*
1969 Support Your Local Sheriff!* 1969
Marlowe*
1970 A Man Called Sledge*
1971 Support Your Local Gunfighter!*
1971 Skin Game*
1972 They Only Kill Their Masters*
1973 One Little Indian*
1974 The Castaway Cowboy*
1980 HealtH *
1981 The Fan*
1982 Victor/Victoria*
1984 Tank*
1985 Murphy's Romance*
1988 Sunset*
1992 The Distinguished Gentleman*
1993 Fire in the Sky*
1994 Maverick*
1996 My Fellow Americans*
1998 Twilight*
2000 Space Cowboys *
2001 Atlantis: The Lost Empire, (voice)
*
2002 Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood*
2003 The Land Before Time X: The Great Longneck Migration, (voice)
*
2004 The Notebook* 2004
Al Roach: Private Insectigator*
2006 The Ultimate Gift*
Maverick (
1957–
1960)
*
Nichols (
1971)
*
The Rockford Files (
1974–
1980)
*
The New Maverick (
1978)
*
Waylon (
1980)
*
Bret Maverick (
1981)
*
The Long Summer of George Adams (
1982)
*
Heartsounds (
1984)
*
Space (
1985) (miniseries)
*
Promise (
1986)
*
My Name is Bill W. (
1989)
*
Decoration Day (
1990)
*
Man of the People (
1991)
*
Barbarians at the Gate (
1993)
*
Breathing Lessons (
1994)
*
The Rockford Files: I Still Love L.A. (
1994)
*
The Rockford Files: A Blessing in Disguise (
1995)
*
Streets of Laredo (
1995) (miniseries)
*
The Rockford Files: If The Frame Fits... (
1996)
*
The Rockford Files: Godfather Knows Best (
1996)
*
The Rockford Files: Friends and Foul Play (
1996)
*
The Rockford Files: Punishment and Crime (
1996)
*
Dead Silence (
1997)
*
The Rockford Files: Murder and Misdemeanors (
1997)
*
Legalese (
1998)
*
The Rockford Files: If It Bleeds... It Leads (
1999)
*
One Special Night (
1999)
*
God, the Devil and Bob (
2000)
*
Chicago Hope (
2000)
*
The Last Debate (
2000)
*
First Monday (
2002)
*
Roughing It (
2002)
*
8 Simple Rules (cast member from
2003–
2005)
*
Maverick (TV series)*
Maverick episode list*
The Rockford Files*
*
Jim's bio @ the Museum of Broadcast Communications*
Yahoo! Movies entry for James Garner*
Rockford Files site*
Poker Walk of Fame*
THIRTY YEARS OF THE ROCKFORD FILES by Ed Robertson*
MAVERICK: LEGEND OF THE WEST by Ed Robertson
