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Clint Walker, star of Cheyenne – obituary
Clint Walker, the actor, who has died aged 90, tried his hand at dozens of jobs – foundry worker, sailor on the Great Lakes, Texan oilfield labourer, vacuum cleaner salesman, trucker, Las Vegas bouncer – before finding fame in 1955 as the star of Warner Bros’ Cheyenne, the first hour-long Western television series.
As Cheyenne Bodie, a soft-spoken former Civil War scout who wanders the West, going from job to job and encountering villains, beautiful women and gunfights along the way, Walker helped to launch the era of the “adult western” – films which tackled serious themes and featured no singing cowboys.
Blue-eyed, square-jawed, 6 ft 6 in tall, and measuring 48-32-36 from chest to waist to hip, Walker (who usually found some excuse to strip down to his waist in each episode), proved a hit with both sexes and the series established him as one of television’s biggest stars.
Yet despite its success, Walker was dissatisfied. Hours were long, pay was poor and he felt that Warner Bros were not keeping to their side of the bargain. “They told me, ‘We’re gonna groom you for feature pictures,’ and the ‘Cheyenne thing’, they said, would be good experience,” he told an interviewer in 2006. “Then they kept me doing it, and Jim Garner [who appeared in the first episode] and other people began to do feature pictures. And then I found out – [the studio] didn’t tell me – that Sophia Loren wanted me for Houseboat.”
But the role went to Cary Grant and in 1958 Walker walked off the set of Cheyenne to look for gold in the Mojave desert.
The series continued, focusing on another character, Bronco Layne, played by Ty Hardin. After lengthy negotiations, Walker and the studio came to terms and in 1959 he returned to the show. He continued to play the lonely gunfighter for another three years while appearing in a few Warner Bros feature-length Westerns. Ty Hardin was given his own spin-off show, Bronco, and became independently successful.
But Walker never really made it on the big screen, although his good looks and impressive physique won him roles in such popular action films as None But the Brave (1965), The Night of the Grizzly (1966), The Great Bank Robbery (1969) and Pancho Villa (1972). He also showed he could handle comedy in Send Me No Flowers (1964, with Rock Hudson and Doris Day), in which he played Doris Day’s old college sweetheart.
His most memorable big-screen role was as Samson Posey, the gentle giant of The Dirty Dozen (1967), a film whose all-star cast included Lee Marvin, Ernest Borgnine and Charles Bronson. As a Native American convict, Walker challenged film clichés about Native Americans as “naturally warlike”, though he was disappointed that the film makers had (probably wisely) edited out a scene in which he performed an Apache rain dance.
He was born Norman Eugene Walker on May 30 1927, in Hartford, Illinois, later changing his name to the more cowboyish Clint.
His mother was a seamstress and his father found whatever work he could – including as a boxer in a travelling show. Young Norman took odd jobs from the age of nine to help his family and left school aged 16 to join the workforce. He later claimed to have done 126 different jobs during his life.
In 1954, while working as a bouncer at the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas, he met the actor Van Johnson, who suggested he might try his luck in Hollywood. After making his debut in 1954 in the Bowery Boys’ film Jungle Gents, playing an uncredited Tarzan (“You no take Jane,” was his only line), he found himself under consideration for a “big guy” role in Cecil B DeMille’s forthcoming epic The Ten Commandments, starring Charlton Heston and Yul Brynner.
Walker thought all was lost after he arrived late for the interview, having stopped on the way to help a woman change a tyre. DeMille, he recalled, “looked me up and down and said, ‘You’re late young man.’ I thought, ‘Oh no, my career is over before it even started’.” But when Walker explained why he was late DeMille responded: “Yes, I know all about it. That was my secretary.”
DeMille immediately cast him as the captain of the Pharaoh’s guard in the film that came out in 1956. He was put under contract to Paramount but soon moved to Warner Bros. Two weeks after his arrival, the studio launched its search for Cheyenne Bodie.
Walker always prided himself on performing his own stunts. For Cheyenne he had to learn to ride his horse, Brandy, after being told by the director: “You’ll end up a good rider, or you’ll end up dead.”
As well as Cheyenne, he made three features for Warner Bros – Fort Dobbs (1958) Yellowstone Kelly (1959) and Gold of the Seven Saints (1961, with Roger Moore), Westerns directed by Gordon Douglas designed to capitalise on Walker’s success in Cheyenne. Box office results, though, were modest. Walker left the studio in 1962.
His last film appearance was in 1991 when he reprised the role of Cheyenne Bodie in the Kenny Rogers film The Gambler Returns: The Luck of the Draw, and in 1995, aged 68, he took the role again in an episode of the television series Kung Fu: The Legend Continues. In 1998 he voiced the character of Nick Nitro in the animated film Small Soldiers.
Walker’s first marriage, to Verna, was dissolved. His second wife, Giselle, died in 1994. In 1997 he married, thirdly, Susan Cavallari, who survives him with a daughter from his first marriage.
Clint Walker, born May 30 1927, died May 21 2018