Biography
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 word 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 again.
Garner was originally sole star of Maverick (for the first seven episodes) but production demands forced the studio, Warner Brothers, 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 Marverick 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 Brothers.
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 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).
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 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 only played second lead, supporting fellow ex-TV series cowboy Steve McQueen.
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.
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. 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 the superb 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 heart 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).
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 and 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 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. 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.
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.]
Filmography
Toward the Unknown (1956)
The Girl He Left Behind (1956)
Shoot-Out at Medicine Bend (1957)
Sayonara (1957)
Darby's Rangers (1958)
Up Periscope (1959)
Alias Jesse James (1959) (uncredited)
Cash McCall (1960)
The Children's Hour (1961)
Boys' Night Out (1962)
The Great Escape (1963)
The Thrill of It All (1963)
The Wheeler Dealers (1963)
Move Over, Darling (1963)
The Americanization of Emily (1964)
36 Hours (1965)
The Art of Love (1965)
A Man Could Get Killed (1966)
Duel at Diablo (1966)
Mister Buddwing (1966)
Grand Prix (1966)
Hour of the Gun (1967)
How Sweet It Is! (1968)
The Pink Jungle (1968)
Support Your Local Sheriff! (1969)
Marlowe (1969)
A Man Called Sledge (1970)
Support Your Local Gunfighter (1971)
Skin Game (1971)
They Only Kill Their Masters (1972)
One Little Indian (1973)
The Castaway Cowboy (1974)
HealtH (1980)
The Fan (1981)
Victor/Victoria (1982)
Tank (1984)
Murphy's Romance (1985)
Sunset (1988)
The Distinguished Gentleman (1992)
Fire in the Sky (1993)
Maverick (1994)
My Fellow Americans (1996)
Twilight (1998)
Space Cowboys (2000)
Atlantis: The Lost Empire ((2001) (voice)
Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood (2002)
The Land Before Time X: The Great Longneck Migration (2003) (voice)
The Notebook (2004)
Al Roach: Private Insectigator (2004)
Television Credits
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)
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)
