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James Garner (b. April, 1928) is an American film and Emmy-award
winning 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.
Mazda also had him as their spokesperson appearing in their commercials in the
North American market during the 1980's.
 Early
life
Garner, the youngest of three children, was born as James Scott Bumgarner, the son
of Mildred (née Meek), who died when Garner was four years old, and Weldon Warren
Bumgarner, a carpet layer. His mother was part Cherokee. 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, James 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".
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, Garner joined the United States Merchant Marine at sixteen. He was a good
worker and got along with all his shipmates, but he suffered from chronic
seasickness and could not shake it no matter how hard he tried. 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 at
close quarters, night after night. Garner 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.
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.
Acting
career
Maverick
After forty supporting feature film roles, including the smash hit 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 originally 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
phenomenally 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 marveled at Garner and Kelly's
extraordinary chemistry in their episodes together, 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 an eventual movie James Bond, 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 (1958 film)
Garner was selected and performed well in the role, with Warner Brothers 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 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 ground-breaking racing film Grand Prix gave Garner a fascination with car
racing. Directed by John Frankenheimer, the movie is regarded as the best racing
film of all time by many motor sports enthusiasts. 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, 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 (not unusual for a writer of the era), but Grant never took the
part himself. Dick Powell, Humphrey Bogart, Robert Mitchum, and even Elliot Gould
all took turns at it, but only Garner's version features 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 Gerry Anderson's 1963 children's TV series Stingray, the character Troy Tempest
was based on the facial features of James Garner.
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. It
was Garner's favorite TV series outing, but was nearly as unpopular as Maverick had
been sensationally successful. 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 and eventual TV icon
Stephen J. Cannell, and the pair tapped Garner to attempt to rekindle the
phenomenal success of Maverick, eventually recycling many of the plots from the
original series. Starting with the 1974 season, Garner was back on television as
private investigator Jim Rockford in The Rockford Files. For six seasons, the
iconoclastic scripts stood Garner in good stead and many consider Rockford his best
role, for which he received an Emmy Award for Best Actor in 1977. Veteran character
actor Noah Beery, Jr., nephew of screen legend Wallace Beery, 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. As with
Beery, Garner had had a close bond with Santos over the years. Rounding out the
cast was a then unfamiliar actor, and another 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, a friend of Garner (often wrongly assumed to be his wife) 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 pulled the plug on the show, despite consistently high
ratings, because of the high 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 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, some years before successful treatments for ulcers were
discovered. Doctors warned Garner that if he didn't rest, he would die, and his
facial appearance in the final episode seems to bear that out.
Hartley said that working with Garner had been the highlight of her career. She
regularly appeared together in Polaroid Camera commercials with Garner. A paparazzi
shot of a performed kiss between the two actors, whilst filming her guest
appearance on the show, caused a minor scandal when a tabloid published it as a
"real" kiss, evidence of an alleged adulterous affair.
Margolin said of his longtime colleague that despite Garner's health problems in
the later years of Rockford, he would often work long shifts, unusually 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.
Later
career
After a rest, Garner returned to his most popular 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. Apparently the fight was worth it, as 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.
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 an extremely Earp-like role as 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 starring 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 revered 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 responsibilities 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.
The
tall-dark-stranger
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 affectionately led the delighted
audience in a lively sing-along of the original Maverick theme song, written by
David Buttolph and Paul Francis Webster.
Personal
life
Racing
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 (see: list
of Indianapolis 500 pace cars).
Golfing
Garner was an avid golfer for many years. He played in high school along with his
brother Jack. Jack even attempted a professional career after a brief stint in the
Pittsburgh Pirates baseball farm system. 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.
University of
Oklahoma
James Garner is a big supporter for the University of Oklahoma, he often returns to
Norman for school functions. For years he could be seen on the sidelines or up 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.
Politics
Garner is a strong Democratic Party supporter, contributing over $7500 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. When he was
signed to play a former President in My Fellow Americans he and co-star Jack
Lemmon, Lemmon of who is a Republican in real life and in the film. 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.
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) (Cameo)
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)
Action on the Beach (1964) (short subject)
The Americanization of Emily (1964)
36 Hours (1965)
The Art of Love (1965)
Grand Prix: Challenge of the Champions (1966) (short subject)
A Man Could Get Killed (1966)
Duel at Diablo (1966)
Mister Buddwing (1966)
Grand Prix (1966)
Hour of the Gun (1967)
Once Upon a Wheel (1968) (documentary)
The Man Who Makes the Difference (1968) (short subject)
How Sweet It Is! (1968)
The Pink Jungle (1968)
The Racing Scene (1969) (documentary)
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)
Heartsounds (1984)
Tank (1984)
Murphy's Romance (1985)
Sunset (1988)
The Distinguished Gentleman (1992)
Fire in the Sky (1993)
Barbarians at the Gate (1993)
Maverick (1994)
Wild Bill: Hollywood Maverick (1996) (documentary)
My Fellow Americans (1996)
The Hidden Dimension (1997) (documentary) (narrator)
Twilight (1998)
One Special Night 1999
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)
(direct-to-DVD)
The Notebook (2004)
Al Roach: Private Investigator (2004) (short subject) (voice)
The Ultimate Gift (2007)
The Magic Shoe (2007)
Terra (2008) (voice)
Source : Some of the information on
this page came from a Wikipedia article and is licensed under the GNU
Documentation License. ©2008 www.geneticmatrix.com.
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James Garner
- Emotional Projector - Biography
