James Garner, the US star of hit TV series The Rockford Files and Maverick and films including The Great Escape, has died aged 86.
Garner had suffered ill health since a severe stroke in 2008.
“Mr Garner died of natural causes,” the West LA Division of the Los Angeles Police Department told the BBC, adding they had two officers at the scene.
His body has been released to his family by a doctor, the police spokesman said.
Garner’s greatest successes were as laconic private investigator Jim Rockford in the 70s and 80s and also the poker-playing Bret Maverick in the Western comedy during the 50s and early 60s.
The actor was also Oscar-nominated for best actor in 1986 for the romantic comedy Murphy’s Romance, in which he played a small town pharmacist.
He starred alongside Doris Day in the 1963 screwball comedy Move over Darling and with Julie Andrews in gender-bending comedy Victor Victoria in 1982.
He won an Emmy in 1977 for The Rockford Files and was given a Screen Actor’s Guild lifetime achievement award in 2005.
In 1963’s iconic World War Two film The Great Escape, Garner played flight lieutenant Robert Hendley, an American in the RAF, alongside Steve McQueen, Richard Attenborough and Donald Pleasence.
The film depicted the daring escape by prisoners of war from the German Stalag Luft III camp through a 336ft (102m) long tunnel. Only three reached safety and of the 73 recaptured, 50 were shot.
Hendley’s role in the film was as the “scrounger” who managed to get hold of identity cards, clothes and a camera.
Garner’s career as an actor began after he won a role in the 1956 film Towards the Unknown, about a group of experimental aircraft test pilots at Edwards Air Force Base in the 1950s, when supersonic flight was in its infancy.
Globe nominations
He was also uncredited as Bret Maverick in a 1957 episode of the TV series Sugarfoot, about a civil war adventurer who lacks cowboy skills but roams the West in search of adventure.
But in the same year, Garner secured the lead role in the TV series Maverick, which ran until 1962.
He starred as one of two poker-playing brothers, alongside Jack Kelly as Bart Maverick, who travelled from town to town trying to make money while avoiding any form of manual labour.
Garner was also nominated for nine Golden Globes for shows including The Rockford Files in 1980 and Maverick in 1982, having won in 1958 for most promising newcomer.
He also won a further two for TV series Decoration Day [1991] and Barbarians at the Gate [1994].
BBC
