DOUG MCCLUREDoug McClure, who died on 5 February, 1995, was a heroic leading man of the small screen during a 40-year career.He was best known for his role in the long-running television Western The Virginian which led to him becoming one of the most frequent faces in television films and series.He was able to consistently play well below his age thanks to youthful looks. He was clean-cut, blond and had a laid-back acting style well suited for TV, but Hollywood success eluded him.Douglas Osborne McClure was born on 11 May, 1935, in Glendale, California. He learned the horse and rope skills he would later use on screen at the local ranches and was also a keen surfer.He rode the rodeo professionally until being spotted by a modelling agent in the late 1950s and then began appearing in adverts and doing bit-part jobs on television.His first starring role was in the San Francisco detective agency series Checkmate as one third of a team who specialise in preventing crimes before they happen. The show ran for two years and was popular with critics because of its atmosphere and the intelligence of its plots, while McClure was praised for his performances.After Checkmate finished in 1962, McClure was cast as Trampas, sidekick to the eponymous hero in The Virginian (played by James Drury). The Virginian saw the pair of ranch foremen embark on feature-length adventures in an impressive 249 episodes.Because of its length, The Virginian had one of the most demanding filming schedules in the business, but was also immensely popular. Drury and McClure, who had gone to the same high school, became great friends during its filming and relaxed together after shoots smoking and drinking.In 1970, NBC inexplicably decided to rename the show Men From Shiloh which resulted in ratings plummeting. During its run McClure had begun a movie career, playing a racing engineer in The Lively Set (1964) and a civil war Lieutenant in Shenandoah (1965).After the cancellation of Men From Shiloh in 1971, he found an abundance of roles, albeit supporting ones, mainly in sci-fi adventures and thrillers, such as high-tech espionage series Search (1972-73), seafaring horror Satan’s Triangle (1975) and dinosaur romp The Land That Time Forgot (1975).Though he only made 20 cinema films, he worked with some of the biggest names in the business, including James Stewart, Dick Clark, Burt Lancaster, Charles Bronson and Kim Novak, but never really made it in Hollywood, despite attempts to brand him a swashbuckling Errol Flynn type, even giving him Flynn’s role in a 1967 remake of Against All Flags.He spent the 1980s making appearances in series like Fantasy Island, Magnum PI, The Fall Guy, Airwolf and Murder, She Wrote, and despite being in his late 40s he was able to play characters 20 years younger, meaning he still looked the same as he did in his earlier films which were frequently repeated.After becoming something of a cult figure (in part thanks to being parodied in The Simpsons as journeyman actor Troy McClure), the 1990s saw Doug return to the root of his fame, appearing in the Westerns Dead Man's Revenge (1994), Maverick (1994) and Riders in the Storm (1995). He also set up a production company to make documentaries.Doug McClure died at his ranch in California from lung cancer at the age of 59. A few months earlier he had been given a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. He had been married three times and had two daughters, one of whom, Tane McClure, became an ’80s pop singer and actress.
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