He died yesterday.

I loved watching James Garner from the time I first saw him in the cowboy TV series Maverick. He was perfect in the role of a wry nattily dressed card player roaming the west and getting into adventures. What made him unusual as a cowboy was that as far as possible he would try to avoid getting into fights (he did not like the idea of getting hurt and besides he did not want to mess up his clothes) and did not want to be a hero and preferred to use his wits to get out of trouble but at the same time his sense of what was right kept getting him involved on behalf of the downtrodden.

Here is one (badly-cut) episode where Clint Eastwood also appears that gives you a taste of what the show was like.

He never really changed that character as time went by, he merely changed the context, moving on in The Rockford Files to playing the role of an eternally hard-up private detective who once served time for a crime he did not commit and ended up living and working out of a trailer. His clients almost always managed to avoid paying him and his friends took advantage of him. Here is a full 50-minutes episode of that show that I picked out at random. One thing about these older shows is the more leisurely pace with longer scenes with little of the rapid-fire cross-cutting that modern shows have.

The same easy-going charm and light comedic touch served him in well in films too. I have a friend whose boyfriend is a fairly well-known actor who has worked with Garner. He said that in real life, Garner was just as nice and easy going as he appears on the screen. In other words, he made a good living just being himself.

Garner gave me many, many happy hours of watching TV and films. I’ll miss him.