Andrew McLaglen, Director in the Heyday of TV Westerns, Dies at 94
Andrew V. McLaglen, a British-born director whose work in American westerns on television and in the movies starred such notable screen cowpokes, gunslingers and lawmen as John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, James Arness and James Stewart, died on Saturday at his home in Friday Harbor, Wash. He was 94.
His death was confirmed by the Evans Funeral Chapel and Crematory in Friday Harbor.
The son of the actor Victor McLaglen, who won an Academy Award in 1935 for The Informer, John Ford’s bruising morality tale set in 1920s Dublin, Mr. McLaglen never planned to specialize in westerns, but he became one of Hollywood’s most reliable deployers of cowboys, Indians, bucking broncos, herds of cattle and posses on horseback.
In the 1950s and ’60s, the great era of television westerns, Mr. McLaglen directed dozens of episodes of the long-running series Gunsmoke, which starred Arness as Marshal Matt Dillon; more than 100 episodes of"Have Gun - Will Travel, starring Richard Boone as Paladin, a chess-playing gun for hire with a connoisseur’s appreciation of fine cigars and wines; a half-dozen episodes of Rawhide, in which Clint Eastwood became a star as the handsome young acolyte of a cattle-drive boss (played by Eric Fleming); and episodes of Gunslinger, The Virginian and Wagon Train.
In the 1980s, he directed The Shadow Riders, a television film adapted from a Louis L’Amour novel about brothers (Tom Selleck and Sam Elliott) returning home from fighting on different sides of the Civil War, and The Blue and the Gray, a Civil War saga presented as a three-part mini-series.
Mr. McLaglen directed Stewart in four films, including Shenandoah (1965), in which he played a Virginia farmer drawn into the Civil War, and The Rare Breed (1966), in which he played a cowboy who helps an English widow (Maureen O’Hara) transport a prize bull to a Texas breeder. He directed Kirk Douglas, Robert Mitchum, Richard Widmark and, in her first significant film role, Sally Field, in the wagon-train saga The Way West (1967).
He also had a long association with John Wayne, who worked several times with his father. The younger Mr. McLaglen directed Wayne in five films, including McLintock!, a 1963 comedy in which Wayne played a wealthy cattle baron with a passel of vexations, not least his rebellious wife (Ms. O’Hara), to whom at one point he delivers a public spanking; and Chisum (1970), about a range war in New Mexico, in which Wayne played a cattle baron who joins forces with Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid.
The New York Times critic Howard Thompson called Chisum "a conventional western," but added that under the direction of Andrew V. McLaglen, "it looks as western as all get-out."
Andrew Victor McLaglen was born in London on July 28, 1920, and moved with his family to California shortly thereafter. He graduated from what is now the Cate School, near Santa Barbara, where he made his first amateur movies, and spent a year at the University of Virginia. At 6 foot 7, he was disqualified from military service because of his height and spent World War II working for Lockheed, the aircraft company.
In a 2009 interview with the website Senses of Cinema, he explained how he entered the movie business:
"When I got out of Lockheed, my father said: "The one thing I’m gonna advise you is don’t go in the picture business. It’s disappointing, it’s hard work, it’s full of ups and downs, and I just suggest that you skip that.’ Well, I didn’t take his suggestion. Instead, I wrote a letter to Herbert J. Yates, the head of Republic Pictures," where his father was making a movie at the time. "I told him who I was, and I said, "I really wanna get into the motion picture business’ and so on. He wrote me a letter back and said, ’Come to work.’"
At Republic he began by doing menial jobs before rising to an assistant director on Dakota (1945), starring Wayne, and on several other films, including The Quiet Man (1952), directed by Ford, in which his father and Wayne appeared together, and a handful directed by William Wellman.
Mr. McLaglen’s first film as a director was a noir crime thriller, Man in the Vault (1956). Wayne was a producer of his first western, Gun the Man Down (1956), which starred Arness, a connection that led to Mr. McLaglen’s regular work on Gunsmoke.
In addition to his work on television westerns, he directed several episodes of the courtroom drama Perry Mason.
Mr. McLaglen’s survivors include a daughter, Mary. Complete information about his survivors was not available.
Mr. McLaglen’s later films included The Wild Geese (1978), starring Richard Burton and Roger Moore, about a band of mercenaries on a mission in Africa; and Sahara (1983), set in the 1920s, starring Brooke Shields as an heiress who replaces her father as a driver in an auto race through the desert. He retired a few years ago to the San Juan Islands in Washington State, where he directed plays at a community theater.
Asked in 2009 if he was especially fond of the western genre, Mr. McLaglen said no, not at all.
"It was totally by mistake," he said about how he came by his reputation. "I wound up doing a whole bunch of ’Gunsmoke’ episodes. I then became the ’western director,’ the star over at CBS. Then everybody thinks, ’Jesus, that’s his big specialty.’ "
A version of this article appears in print on September 4, 2014, on page B19 of the New York edition with the headline: Andrew McLaglen, 94, Director of Westerns.