James Garner was tall and handsome, two necessary traits in any Hollywood leading man.  But it was his easy-going charm and self-deprecating humor that helped him build a lengthy career as one of the most-bankable stars in TV and movies.  The 86-year-old Garner was found dead of natural causes at his Los Angeles home over the weekend.

From the 1950s onward, Garner played all the roles – cowboy, soldier, detective, astronaut, and racecar driver.  Starting with supporting roles in such features as “The Girl He Left Behind”, “Toward the Unknown”, and the acclaimed “Sayonara” with Marlon Brando, Garner found the first of his most endearing roles on the American action-comedy series “Maverick” beginning on 1957. 

That led to leading roles in the 1960s:  the sex comedy “Boys’ Night Out”; stepping in for Rock Hudson opposite Doris Day in “The Thrill of It All” and “Move Over, Darling”; World War II action with Steve McQueen in “The Great Escape”; international grand prix racing with Yves Montand and Toshiro Mifune in “Grand Prix”; and introducing Martial Arts star Bruce Lee to western audiences in “Marlowe”.

But the laid back cowboy that defined his image would come back in the 1969 western spoof “Support Your Local Sheriff!”, and in Garner’s most-successful TV role “The Rockford Files”, a clever western comedy masquerading as a private eye show.  As a wrongly-convicted man who was pardoned and turned gumshoe, Jim Rockford shared a first name with his portrayer, rode the wild west of Los Angeles in an iconic gold Pontiac Firebird, and was surrounded by a cast of misfits fueled by some of the best writing Hollywood has ever had.

Garner’s career didn’t slow a bit after that.  After playing a sexually-confused gangster in Balek Edwards’ “Victor/Victoria”, Garner was nominated for a Best Actor Oscar for “Murphy’s Romance” opposite Sally Field.  And he still had enough goodwill with TV audiences to build the new era in made-for-cable TV movies, starring in HBO pictures’ “The Glitter Dome” and the groundbreaking “Barbarians at the Gate”. 

A life-long political Liberal by the American definition, he strongly supported the Democratic Party, was in the third row when Martin Luther King made his “I Have a Dream” speech in Washington, DC in 1963, and even had a character’s political orientation changed before taking a role – Garner said, “My wife would leave me if I played a Republican.”

James Garner got married to Lois Fleishman Clarke in 1956, and unlike many of his peers, they stayed married for almost six decades.  He was found dead in his home in the Brentwood section of Los Angeles on Saturday, 19 July.  Authorities say he died of natural causes.