Early life

Garner, the youngest of three children, was born as James Scott Bumgarner in Norman, Oklahoma, 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". Garner admitted that his stepmother punished him by forcing him to wear a dress in public, and that he finally engaged in a physical fight with her, knocking her down and choking her to keep her from killing him in retaliation. This incident ended the marriage.

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. 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.

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.^[15] 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.

  The Notebook (Mass Market Paperback)