After modeling Jantzen bathing suits in print ads, in 1954 Garner landed a non-speaking role in the Broadway production of The Caine Mutiny Court Martial, where he was able to study the 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). When his first child was born, he decided she had too many names and legally changed his surname to Garner.
One of his two brothers, Jack, has also had an acting career, and similarly changed his surname to Garner. His other brother, Charlie, a non-actor, retained the Baumgarner surname.
After fourty 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 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. 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'd gotten 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).
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 Ku techniques in popular media.
In 1971, Garner returned to television in an extremely offbeat western called Nichols. The motorcycle-riding character was killed early on in the single-season series, and Garner was re-cast as the character's more normal twin brother. 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. Actor Noah Beery, Jr., nephew of screen legend Wallace Beery, played Rockford's father, 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 another friend of Garner's who had previously co-starred with him on Nichols, Stuart Margolin, playing Jim's ex-cellmate and less-than-trustworthy friend 'Angel' Martin.
Critics noted that The Rockford Files took iconoclasm to new heights, by cynically 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.
After a rest, Garner returned to his most popular TV role in 1981 in the 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 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 funereal pace, and practically everyone in the original cast of recurring characters returned for the new episodes, except Beery who had died.
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. Despite reasonably fair ratings, the show was cancelled 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 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 the largely underrated 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'd 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.
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.
In 2006, a ten-foot tall statue of James Garner as Bret Maverick was unveiled in Garner's hometown of Norman, Oklahoma, with Garner present at the ceremony.
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:
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