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 his body has been released to his family by a doctor.
Garner famously played laconic private investigator Jim Rockford.
He won an Emmy for the role in 1977 and starred in 122 episodes of the hugely successful show from 1974 to 1980. He returned to it in the 1990s with eight Rockford Files TV movies.
Another role, as the poker-playing Bret Maverick in the Western comedy, was also a hit with TV viewers, running for 60 episodes from 1957 to 1962, and again for another 18 episodes from 1981 to 1982.
Richard Natale of Variety said that the role of the laid-back, work-shy Maverick fitted "his wry personality like a glove".
The TV show was made into a film in 1992 starring Mel Gibson and Jodie Foster, but also starred Garner - this time on the right side of the law, as Marshal Zane Cooper.
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 actor was also Oscar-nominated for best actor in 1986 for the romantic comedy Murphy's Romance, co-starring Sally Field, in which he played a small town pharmacist.
Other leading ladies included Doris Day, who he starred with in the 1963 screwball comedy Move over Darling, and Julie Andrews, his co-star in gender-bending comedy Victor Victoria in 1982.
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.
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.
Garner's career peaked during his highly successful TV series, and he was 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].
He starred with Sandra Bullock and Ellen Burstyn in mother-daughter drama Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, in 2002 and in 2005 he was given a Screen Actor's Guild lifetime achievement award.
Posted: Sun Jul 20, 2014 2:04 pm