|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
James Garner (born April 7, 1928) is an American film and Emmy-award winning television actor. Handsome, good-humored American leading man whose breakthrough came with the tongue-in-cheek alternative to the spate of sober TV Westerns proliferating in the late 1950s, "Maverick". Bantering winningly alongside co-star Jack Kelly, Garner enjoyed five seasons of popular and critical success with the show, which helped launch him into feature film success in the early 60s. Garner had played several leads in such enjoyable minor fare as "Darby's Rangers" (1958) and "Cash McCall" (1959) but it was really as "Maverick" wound down that Garner was ballyhooed as the next Clark Gable. William Wyler's 1961 remake of "The Children's Hour" gave him the least showy lead as a man in love with a woman implied in a lesbian affair, but at least the film helped to counteract criticism that his was primarily a lightweight talent. Still, his most popular films of the period were those which spotlighted Garner's wry, easygoing reluctance amid comic mayhem. "The Thrill of It All" and "Move Over, Darling" (both 1963) substituted him for Rock Hudson opposite Hollywood's most popular star at that time, Doris Day, and even the exciting war pic, "The Great Escape" (1963) went for laughs as much as thrills. Indeed, by the time of the enjoyable "Support Your Local Sheriff" (1969) and "Support Your Local Gunfighter" (1971), Garner was back in "Maverick" territory, except with the zaniness quotient gone through the roof. Garner's career definitely had a vital third act. He returned to television fequently, first as the voice of the Almighty in the short-lived animated primetime sit-com "God, the Devil and Bob" (2000), then that same year for the final season of David E. Kelley's medical drama "Chicago Hope" as the hospital's paternal CEO Hue Miller, again in 2002 as the archconservative Chief Justice Thomas Brankin in the little-seen Supreme Court drama "First Monday" (2002) and once again in a recurring role as Katy Segal's father Jim in the ABC sit-com "8 Simple Rules..." (2001 - ) following the real-life death of series lead John Ritter, a role which reunited him with his "Support Your Local Gunfighter" co-star Suzanne Pleshette, who played his wife on the series. And he proved that he still had some big screen magic to spare when he delivered a captivating and heartbreaking performance as Duke, the devoted, hopeful husband of Alzheimer-ravaged Allie (Gena Rowlands), in the modern-day sequences of Nick Cassavetes' effectively emotional adaptation of the bestseller "The Notebook" (2004). He has starred in several television series spanning a career of more than five decades. These included his roles as Bret Maverick, in the popular 1950s western-comedy series, Maverick; Jim Rockford, in the popular 1970s detective drama, The Rockford Files; and the father of Katey Sagal's character on 8 Simple Rules following the death of John Ritter. He has starred in dozens of movies, including The Great Escape (1963) with Steve McQueen; Paddy Chayefsky's The Americanization of Emily (1964) and Blake Edwards' Victor/Victoria (1982), both with Julie Andrews; and Murphy's Romance (1985) with Sally Field, for which he received an Academy Award nomination. Mazda also had him as their spokesperson appearing in their commercials in the North American market during the 1980s. Garner, the youngest of three children, was born as James Scott Bumgarner in Norman, Oklahoma, the son of Mildred Meek and Weldon Warren Bumgarner, a carpet layer. His mother, who was part Cherokee, died when he was four years old. After their mother's death, Garner and his brothers were sent to live with relatives. Garner was reunited with his family in 1934, when Weldon remarried. Garner grew to hate his stepmother, Wilma, who beat all three boys, but especially young James. When he was fourteen, Garner finally had enough of his 'wicked stepmother' and after a particularly heated battle, she left for good. James' brother Jack commented, "She was a damn no-good woman". Garner admitted that his stepmother punished him by forcing him to wear a dress in public, and that he finally engaged in a physical fight with her, knocking her down and choking her to keep her from killing him in retaliation. This incident ended the marriage. Shortly after the breakup of the marriage, Weldon Bumgarner moved to Los Angeles while Garner and his brothers remained in Norman. After working at several jobs he disliked, at sixteen, Garner joined the United States Merchant Marine. He fared well in the work and with shipmates, but suffered from chronic seasickness. At seventeen, he joined his father in Los Angeles and enrolled at Hollywood High School, where he was voted the most popular student. He modeled Jantzen bathing suits at this time. It paid well, but, in his first interview for the Archives of American Television, he said he hated modeling, and soon quit and returned to Norman. There he played football and basketball, as well as competing on the track and golf teams, for Norman High School. Later, he joined the National Guard. He served in the Army in the Korean War, where he received two Purple Hearts. In 1954, a friend, Paul Gregory, whom Garner had met while attending Hollywood High School, convinced Garner to take a non-speaking role in the Broadway production of The Caine Mutiny Court Martial, where he was able to study actor Henry Fonda night after night. Garner subsequently moved 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. He changed his last name from Bumgarner to Garner after the studio had credited him as "James Garner" without permission. He then legally changed it when his first child was born, as he decided she had too many names. His brother Jack also had an acting career and changed his surname to Garner too. His other, non-actor brother, Charlie, retained the Bumgarner surname. After forty supporting feature film roles, including Sayonara with Marlon Brando, Garner got his big break playing the role of professional gambler Bret Maverick in the comedy Western series 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 eventually made Garner a household name. Various actors had recurring roles as Maverick foils, including Efrem Zimbalist, Jr as "Dandy Jim Buckley," Richard Long as "Gentleman Jack Darby," and Diane Brewster as "Samantha Crawford," while 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 the sole star of Maverick for the first seven episodes but production demands forced the studio, Warner Brothers, to create a Maverick brother, Bart, played by Jack Kelly. This allowed two production units to film different story lines and episodes simultaneously. The series also featured popular cross-over episodes featuring both Maverick brothers, including the famous "Shady Deal at Sunny Acres," upon which the first half of the 1975 movie The Sting appears to be based. Critics were postive about Garner and Kelly's chemistry, but Garner quit the series in the third season because of a dispute with Warner Brothers. The studio attempted to replace Garner's character with a Maverick cousin who had lived in Britain long enough to pick up an English accent, played by Roger Moore, but Moore quit the series due to a decline in script quality after only 15 episodes, saying that if he had had stories like Garner's early ones, he would have stayed. Warner Brothers 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). When Charlton Heston turned down the lead role of Darby's Rangers, Garner was selected and performed well in the role, with Warner Brothers subsequently giving him lead roles in other films such as Up Periscope and Cash McCall. 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 Joan Hackett, Walter Brennan, Harry Morgan, and Jack Elam. The racing film Grand Prix, directed by John Frankenheimer, left Garner with a fascination for car racing. Unlike Paul Newman and Steve McQueen, Garner was not as successful in his real-life racing exploits. The Americanization of Emily, a literate anti-war D-Day comedy, featured a script by Paddy Chayefsky and has remained Garner's favorite of all his work. In The Great Escape, Garner played the second lead for the only time during the decade, supporting fellow ex-TV series cowboy Steve McQueen. In 1969, Garner joined a long list of actors to play Raymond Chandler's Phillip Marlowe, in Marlowe. Chandler had written the character while visualizing Cary Grant in the role, but Grant never took the part himself. Dick Powell, Humphrey Bogart, Robert Mitchum, and even Elliot Gould all took turns at it, but it was Garner's version that featured Bruce Lee dropping by his office to smash everything into pieces in one of the first displays of Kung Fu techniques in popular media. In 1971, Garner returned to television in an offbeat western called Nichols. The motorcycle-riding character was killed in what became the final episode of the single-season series. Garner was re-cast as the character's more normal twin brother, in the hopes of creating a more popular series with few cast changes. The network changed the show's title to James Garner as Nichols during its second month in a vain attempt to rally the sagging ratings. According to Garner's videotaped Archive of American Television interview, Garner had Nichols killed in the last episode so that a sequel could never be filmed. In the 1970s, Roy Huggins had an idea to redo Maverick, but this time as a modern-day private detective. Huggins teamed with co-creator Stephen J. Cannell, and the pair tapped Garner to attempt to rekindle the success of Maverick, eventually recycling many of the plots from the original series. Starting with the 1974 season, Garner appeared as private investigator Jim Rockford in The Rockford Files. He appeared for six seasons, for which he received an Emmy Award for Best Actor in 1977. Veteran character actor Noah Beery, Jr. played Rockford's father, Joseph "Rocky" Rockford, while Gretchen Corbett portrayed Rockford's lawyer and sometime lover until she left the series over a salary dispute with the studio. Garner also invited yet another familiar actor Joe Santos, who played Rockford's friend in the Los Angeles Police Department, Detective Dennis Becker. Rounding out the cast was character actor and friend of Garner's who had previously co-starred with him on Nichols, Stuart Margolin, playing Jim's ex-cell mate and less-than-trustworthy friend 'Angel' Martin. In the first episode of Season Six, Paradise Cove, Mariette Hartley guest-starred as Court Auditor Althea Morgan. Critics noted that The Rockford Files took iconoclasm to new heights, by portraying almost everyone in authority as mean-spirited, wrong-headed, or plain stupid. Garner himself ultimately ended the run of the show, despite consistently high ratings, because of the high physical toll on his body. Appearing in nearly every scene of the series, doing many of his own stunts including one that injured his back was wearing him out. A knee injury from his National Guard days worsened in the wake of the continuous jumping and rolling, and he was hospitalized with a bleeding ulcer in 1979. Garner later appeared with Rockford Files co-star Hartley in a series of Polaroid Camera commercials. Margolin said of his longtime colleague that despite Garner's health problems in the later years of The Rockford Files, he would often work long shifts, unusual for a starring actor, staying to do off-camera lines with other actors, doing his own stunts despite his knee problems. When Garner made The Rockford Files TV movies, he said that 22 people (with the exception of series' co-star Beery, who died late in 1994) came out of retirement, and he was very happy that the entire family was back together again. In July 1981, Garner filed suit against Universal Studios for $22.5 million in connection with his on-going dispute from The Rockford Files. The suit charged Universal with, "breach of contract, failure to deal in good faith and fairly, and fraud and deceit. It was eventually settled out of court a decade later. Garner returned to his earlier TV role in 1981 in the revival series Bret Maverick, but NBC unexpectedly canceled the show after only one season despite reasonably good ratings. Critics noted that most of the scripts did not measure up to the first series, though Garner's performance as a 53-year-old Bret Maverick was almost universally applauded. Jack Kelly (Bart Maverick) was slated to become a series regular had the series been picked up for another season, and he appeared in the last scene of the final episode in a surprise guest role. During the 1980s, Garner played dramatic roles in a number of TV movies, from Heartsounds (with Mary Tyler Moore) to Promise (starring Piper Laurie) and My Name is Bill W.. He was nominated for his first 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 have Garner cast, since he was regarded as a TV actor by then despite having co-starred in the box office hit Victor/Victoria opposite Julie Andrews three years earlier. In A&E's biography of Garner, Field reported that her on-screen kiss with Garner was the best cinematic kiss she had ever experienced. In 1988, Garner underwent quintuple heart bypass surgery. 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 mournfully funereal pace, and practically everyone in the original cast of recurring characters returned for the new episodes except Beery, who had died in the interim. For the second half of the 80s, Garner appeared in several Mazda commercials as an on screen spokesman. In 1991, Garner starred in Man of the People, a television series about a con man chosen to fill an empty seat on a city council, with Kate Mulgrew and Corinne Bohrer. Despite reasonably fair ratings, the show was canceled after only 10 episodes. Garner played Wyatt Earp 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 centered around a fictional relationship between Earp and silent movie cowboy star Tom Mix. The film featured Bruce Willis as Mix in only his second movie role. Although Willis was billed over Garner, the film actually gave more screen time and more emphasis to Earp. Malcolm McDowell played a villainous silent comedian. In 1994, Garner played Marshal Zane Cooper in a movie version of Maverick, with Mel Gibson as Bret Maverick (in the end it is revealed that Garner's character is the father of Gibson's Maverick) and Jodie Foster as a gambling lass with a fake southern accent. In 1995, he 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. The original Lonesome Dove story had been written as a movie script for a 1960s film to be directed by Peter Bogdanovich and star John Wayne, James Stewart, and Henry Fonda, but Wayne turned the part down on John Ford's advice and Stewart backed out as a result, so the movie was abandoned and McMurtry later turned the script into a full-scale novel, Lonesome Dove, which eventually became a television miniseries with Tommy Lee Jones in the Wayne role, Robert Duvall in the Stewart part, and Robert Urich filling in for Fonda as the cowboy regretfully hanged by his own friends. 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 and originally created for John Wayne instead. In 1996, Garner and Jack Lemmon teamed up in My Fellow Americans, playing two former presidents, both framed for scandalous activity in their days in the White House. In addition to a major recurring role during the last part of the run of TV series Chicago Hope, Garner 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 had 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. In 2002, following the death of James Coburn, Garner took over Coburn's role as TV commercial voiceover for Chevrolet's "Like a Rock" advertising campaign. Garner continued to voice the commercials until the end of the campaign. 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. For his contribution to the film and television industry, Garner received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame (at 6927 Hollywood Boulevard). In 1990, he was inducted into the Western Performers Hall of Fame at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. In February 2005 he received the Screen Actor's Guild's Lifetime Achievement Award. When actor Morgan Freeman won an award that Garner had also been nominated for, Freeman led the audience in a sing-along of the original Maverick theme song, written by David Buttolph and Paul Francis Webster. Unlike many celebrities, Garner has been married only once. He met Lois Clarke and married her 14 days later on Aug 17, 1956 during the height of his fame. According to Garner, "Marriage is like the Army; everyone complains, but you'd be surprised at the large number of people who re-enlist.". Garner has two daughters; Kimberly, a stepdaughter, from Clarke's first marriage, and their daughter Greta 'Gigi' Garner. Greta Garner is a book author, song writer and licensed private investigator. Garner underwent surgery on May 11, 2008 following a mild stroke on May 9. His prognosis was reported to be "very positive.". Garner was an owner of the "American International Racers" (AIR) auto racing team from 1967 through 1969. The team fielded cars at Le Mans, Daytona, and Sebring endurance races, but is best known for Garner's celebrity status raising publicity in early off-road motor-sports events. Garner signed a three-year sponsorship contract with American Motors Corporation (AMC). His shops prepared ten 1969 SC/Ramblers for the Baja 500 race. Garner did not drive in this event because of a film commitment in Spain that year. Nevertheless, seven of his cars finished the grueling race, taking three of the top five places in the sedan class. Garner also drove the pace car at the Indianapolis 500 race in 1975, 1977, and 1985. Garner was an avid golfer for many years. Along with his brother Jack, he played in high school. Jack even attempted a professional career after a brief stint in the Pittsburgh Pirates baseball farm system, while James was a regular for years at Pebble Beach Pro-Am. In February 1990 at the AT&T Golf Tournament he won the Most Valuable Amateur Trophy. James Garner is a supporter of the University of Oklahoma, often returning to Norman for school functions. He could frequently be seen on the sidelines or in the press box at Oklahoma Sooners football games. Garner received an honorary Doctor of Human Letters degree at OU in 1995. In 2003, to endow the James Garner Chair in the School of Drama, he donated $500,000, half of a pledged $1 million dollars, for the first endowed position at the drama school. Tom H. Orr, the Director for the School of Drama (Acting Camera Acting) and the Artistic Director University Theatre, currently holds the James Garner Chair at the university. On April 21, 2006, a ten-foot tall bronze statue of Garner as Bret Maverick was unveiled in Garner's hometown of Norman, Oklahoma, with Garner present at the ceremony. Garner is a strong Democratic Party supporter, contributing over $7,500 to Democrats running for Federal office the past seven years, including Dennis Kucinich (for Congress in 2002), Richard Gephardt, John Kerry, Barbara Boxer, and various Democratic committees and groups. Since 1982 Garner has given at least $29,000 to Federal campaigns, and over $24,000 of that has been to the Democrats. For his role in the 1985 CBS miniseries Space, the character's party affiliation was changed from a Republican (as in the book) to reflect Garner's personal views. Prior to the entry of ex-San Francisco Mayor (later U.S. Senator) Dianne Feinstein, there was an effort by party leaders to persuade James Garner to seek the 1990 Democratic nomination for Governor of California. |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Celebrities Guide 
| WhoABC
Home : Disclaimer
: Terms
: Privacy
Policy : Contact
Us : Links All original content Copyright Celebrities Guide, WhoABC.com © 2004 - 2008. All Rights Reserved |