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James Garner (born April 7, 1928) is an American film and television actor.
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.
Early life
Garner, the youngest of three children, was born James Scott Bumgarner in Norman, Oklahoma, the son of Mildred (née Meek) and Weldon Warren Bumgarner, a carpet layer. His mother, who was half Cherokee, died when he was five 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, 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. A high school gym teacher recommended him for a job modeling Jantzen bathing suits. It paid well, $25 an hour, 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 serving seven months in the USA. He then went to Korea for 14 months in the United States Army, serving in the 24th Infantry Division in the Korean War. He was wounded twice, first in the face and hand from shrapnel fire from a mortar round, and second in the buttocks from friendly fire from U.S. fighter jets as he dove headfirst into a foxhole on April 23, 1951. Garner was awarded the Purple Heart in Korea for the first injury. For the second wound, he received a second Purple Heart (eligibility requirement: "As the result of friendly fire while actively engaging the enemy"), although Garner received the medal in 1983, 32 years after his injury. Garner was a self-described "scrounger" for his company in Korea (he would later use this experience for his character in the The Great Escape).
In 1954, a friend, Paul Gregory, whom Garner had met while attending Hollywood High School, persuaded 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.[7] His brother Jack also had an acting career and changed his surname to Garner too. His other, non-actor brother, Charlie, kept the Bumgarner surname.
Acting career
Maverick
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 1973 movie The Sting appears to be based, according to Roy Huggins' Archive of American Television interview. Garner and Clint Eastwood staged an epic fistfight in an episode entitled "Duel at Sundown", in which Eastwood played a vicious gunslinger. Critics were positive about Garner and Jack 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.
1960s
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, The Art of Love and Support Your Local Sheriff!
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 Philip 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 American media.
1970s
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 made.
The Rockford Files
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, Beth Davenport, 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. 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 to participate.
In July 1983, Garner filed suit against Universal Studios for $16.5 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 in 1989. As part of the agreement Garner could not disclose the amount of the settlement.
Garner sued Universal again in 1998 for $2.2 million over syndication royalties. In this suit he charged the studio with "deceiving him and suppressing info about syndication". He was supposed to receive $25,000 per episode that ran in syndication, but Universal charged him "distribution fees". He also felt that the studio did not bid the show out to the highest bidder for the episode reruns.
Later career
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.[citation needed] 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, including Heartsounds (with Mary Tyler Moore), Promise (with 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, and director Martin Ritt, had to fight the studio, Columbia Pictures, 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 two years earlier). Columbia didn't want to make the picture at all, because it had no "sex or violence" in it. But because of the success of Norma Rae (1979), with the same star (Field), director, and screenplay writing team (Harriet Frank Jr. and Irving Ravetch), and with Field's new production company (Fogwood Films) producing, Columbia agreed. Columbia wanted Marlon Brando to play the part of Murphy, so Field and Ritt had to insist on Garner. Part of the deal from the studio, which at that time was owned by the The Coca-Cola Company, included an eight line sequence of Field and Garner saying the word "Coke", and also having Coke signs appear prominently in the film. 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 of the North American market Mazda television 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 miniseries sequel to Lonesome Dove entitled Streets of Laredo, based on Larry McMurtry's book. 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 group 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 in "Duel at Sundown" over forty years earlier; Tommy Lee Jones and Eastwood also stage a brief bar brawl in Space Cowboys. 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.
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