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| Birth Name(s) : James Scott Baumgarner |
Date of Birth: N/A |
| Status:
Single
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Partner:
Lois Clarke (1956-present) |
| Profession:
N/A |
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Full James Garner Biography
Garner, the youngest of three children, was born as James Scott Bumgarner in Norman, Oklahoma, to Weldon Warren Bumgarner, a carpet layer, and Mildred Meek, who died when Garner was four years old. His mother was of part Cherokee ancestry. 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. As 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.
He also 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 competed on the track and golf teams, for Norman High School. Later he joined the National Guard, before serving 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 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.
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.
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. 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.
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. |
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