A timeless maverick

James Garner, the wry and handsome leading man who slid seamlessly between television and the movies but was best known as the amiable gambler Bret Maverick in the 1950s western Maverick and the cranky sleuth Jim Rockford in the 1970s series The Rockford Files, died recently. He was 86.

Garner was a genuine star, but as an actor, something of a paradox: a lantern-jawed, brawny athlete whose physical appeal was both enhanced and undercut by a disarming wit.

He appeared in more than 50 films, many of them dramas — but, as he established in one of his notable early performances, as a battle-shy naval officer in The Americanization of Emily (1964) and had shown before that in Maverick — he was most at home as an iconoclast, a flawed or unlikely hero.

An understated comic actor, he was especially adept at conveying life’s tiny bedevilments. One of his most memorable roles was as a perpetually flummoxed pitchman for Polaroid cameras in the late 1970s and early 1980s, in droll commercials in which he played a vexed husband and Mariette Hartley played his needling wife. His one Academy Award nomination was for the 1985 romantic comedy Murphy’s Romance.

Maverick had been in part a sendup of the conventional western drama, and The Rockford Files similarly made fun of the standard television detective, the man’s man who upholds law and order and has everything under control.

A sucker for a pretty girl with a distinctly ‘70s fashion sense — he favoured loud houndstooth jackets — Rockford was perpetually wandering into threatening situations in which he ended up pursued by criminal goons or corrupt cops.

Garner came to acting late, and by accident. On his own after the age of 14 and a bit of a drifter, he had been working an endless series of jobs: telephone installer, oil field roughneck, chauffeur, dishwasher, janitor, lifeguard, grocery clerk, salesman and gas station attendant.

Years later, after Garner had served in the Army during the Korean War — he was wounded in action twice, earning two Purple Hearts — he was working as a carpet layer in Los Angeles. One afternoon he was driving on La Cienega Boulevard and saw a sign: Paul Gregory & Associates. Just then a car pulled out of a space in front of the building, and Garner, on a whim, pulled in. He was 25.

Gregory, by then an agent and a theatrical producer, hired him for a nonspeaking part in his production of Herman Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial, which starred Henry Fonda, John Hodiak and Lloyd Nolan. Garner said he learned to act from running lines with the stars, especially Fonda, another good-looking actor with a sly streak. “I swiped practically all my acting style from him,” he once said.

James Scott Bumgarner was born in Norman, Oklahoma, on April 7, 1928. Garner’s first Hollywood break came when he met Richard L Bare, a director of the television western Cheyenne, who cast him in a small part. That and other bit roles led to a contract with Warner Bros, which featured him in several movies.

His first lead role was in Darby’s Rangers (1958) as the World War II hero William Darby. In 1964 he starred with Julie Andrews in The Americanization of Emily, which he called his favourite of all his films.

He played the personal attendant of a Navy admiral, a fish out of water, and the voice of the movie’s pacifist point of view. Garner also appeared in the television films My Name Is Bill W (1989), starring James Woods as a founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, and Barbarians at the Gate (1993).

Persuasively ambivalent as a hero of westerns, war movies and detective stories, Garner’s performances may have reflected his feelings about his profession. “I was never enamoured of the business, never even wanted to be an actor, really,” he told The New York Times in 1984. “It’s always been a means to an end, which is to make a living.”