The actor Fess Parker, who has died aged 85, was a quintessential westerner, a tall, rugged, Texas-born athlete turned actor, famous for his portrayals of two frontiersmen, Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone, as well as sheriffs, cowboys and ranchers. He greatly appreciated the commercial rewards of these two title roles, and went on to become a successful businessman.
The Walt Disney studio was the first in Hollywood to move wholeheartedly into television, and had the bright idea of combining three episodes of the Davy Crockett series Parker had made for them in 1954 into a feature. The result, Davy Crockett: King of the Wild Frontier (1955), spawned the craze for coonskin hats and became a box-office hit on the back of its singalong theme. Bill Hayes's recording of The Ballad of Davy Crockett topped the charts for three months, and Parker's own version reached No 5.
Parker's relationship with Disney became the cornerstone of his career, and two further episodes were spliced together as Davy Crockett and the River Pirates (1956). Since the first film had ended with the maverick Tennessee politician's death in 1836 at the Alamo, the fortress near San Antonio, Texas, that had been besieged by the Mexican army, these new stories had to be "prequels".
Parker was a cowboy in André de Toth's Bounty Hunter (1954) and a soldier in Raoul Walsh's memorable Battle Cry (1955). But his best role from this period came as an army spy, James Andrews, in The Great Locomotive Chase (1956). This factually based story, set during the American civil war, had formed the basis of Buster Keaton's masterpiece The General (1926). Disney turned it into a colourful adventure movie, with Jeffrey Hunter as the good guy and the locomotive as the star.
Parker stayed with Disney for the highly successful weepie Old Yeller (1957), where his character role was upstaged by two brilliant child actors and a dog. More conventionally, he was a sheriff in Michael Curtiz's The Hangman, turned up fleetingly as Crockett in Alias Jesse James (both 1959) and was appointed platoon sergeant in Don Siegel's vigorous Hell Is for Heroes (1962).
Although he had had leading roles in westerns such as Along the Oregon Trail (1956) and The Jayhawkers! (1959), work became scarce as the genre suffered from television competition. Parker returned to the small screen, in a change of pace, but the series Mr Smith Goes to Washington (1962-63), based on the 1939 James Stewart classic, proved only a modest success and Parker's tenure as the liberal senator was shortlived.
Salvation came with the role of a frontiersman less complex than Crockett. Daniel Boone was an orthodox, even more famous hero who opened up western territories, including the Cumberland Gap in the Appalachian mountains, during the latter part of the 19th century. The character seemed tailor-made for Parker, who had appeared in the 1956 movie, Daniel Boone, Trail Blazer, but lost out to Bruce Bennett for top honours. There was ample compensation with the 1964 television series, in which Parker had a 30% stake. It ran for six years, allowing the star time for only one movie as Clint in Smoky (1966), a remake of a touching story about a man and his horse, which had first starred Victor Jory, then Fred MacMurray.
After 300 episodes, the Boone series ground to a halt, and Parker made only one more movie, Climb an Angry Mountain (1972). He played a sheriff and took his own second name of Elisha for the character, followed by the surname of the great Gary Cooper, who had starred in one of Parker's earliest movies, Springfield Rifle, 20 years previously.
Born in Fort Worth and brought up in San Angelo, Texas, Parker served in the US navy during the second world war. He transferred from the Hardin-Simmons University, Abilene – where, at 6ft 6in tall, he had been a keen footballer – to the University of Texas, Austin, where he took a history degree in 1950.
He then studied drama at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, and in 1951 took to the stage in the play Mister Roberts. The following year, his modest beginnings continued on television, in Dragnet, with further work on big and small screen.
He could be glimpsed in such series as Death Valley Days and worked for some of Hollywood's finest directors in minor roles, including three movies in all for De Toth, a western for the maverick Hugo Fregonese and two for Douglas Sirk, untypically in modern dress for No Room for the Groom (1952) and Take Me to Town (1953).
These parts paid the rent until one as a ranch foreman in the science-fiction classic Them! (1954) caught the attention of Disney, and the resulting television breakthrough established Parker's fame. Once he had given up acting, he returned to showbusiness only when named "a Disney legend" in 1991, and to appear a decade later in the documentary Walt: The Man Behind the Myth.
Not that Parker retired. He expanded his property interests, developed his vineyards in California and opened hotels in Santa Barbara and more substantially in Los Olivos, where his winery, restaurants and businesses dominated the area.
He adopted a hands-on approach and was a star attraction at his hotels, where affluent tourists and locals could reckon on talking to, or at least catching sight of, the well-built, still handsome man who was once king of the wild frontier.
In 1960, he married Marcella Rinehart. He is survived by her, his son, Eli, and his daughter, Ashley.