The success of these post- 1980 performances derived from his playing it straight, as if he believed in the crazy goings-on around him. In fact, his stiff, humourless acting style differed very little from that in the string of action pictures of his pre-Airplane days. Naturally, the joke was funnier for those who remembered Bridges's far-fetched heroics in the TV series Sea Hunt. This ran for some 156 episodes between 1957 to 1961.

Not so funny was his black-listing. This came during the era of the red scare focused on Senator Joseph McCarthy during the early 1950s. Eventually Bridges succumbed and appeared as a "friendly" witness -- one who co-operated -- before the House Un-American Activities Committee. This meant that he named names of other potential leftists to HUAC and admitted to having been a member of the US Communist Party briefly during the 1940s. This penitential act enabled him, as it did others, to resume his busy acting career, which had begun in the 1930s, after he had taken a law degree at the University of California Los Angeles. He and the actress Dorothy Simpson, whom he married in 1939, went east and performed in stock companies, where he was spotted by a producer for Columbia Pictures and given a contract in 1941.

In four years at Columbia, he walked through 14 features, including several in the studio's Lone Wolf and Boston Blackie series, played stooge to Joe E Brown and Abbott and Costello, and was one of the assorted desert rats under Sergeant Humphrey Bogart in Sahara (1943). On going freelance in 1945 not much changed, with Bridges as on of assorted Gls in a platoon in Italy under Sergeant Dana Andrews in Lewis Milestone's A Walk in the Sun. However the films were getting better, and his roles slightly bigger.

He soon found a niche as a stolid, handsome heavy, often baring his chest, in westerns, obstructing heroes Dana Andrews in Canyon Passage (1946) Joel McCrea in Ramrod (1947), and Randolph Scott in Colt .45 (1950). In The White Tower (1950) Bridges was at his most convincingly obnoxious as an arrogant ex-Nazi on a mountain expedition, who despises Glenn Ford's decadent democratic principles. In the same year in The Sound of Fury. he played a brutish kidnapper who kills his victim, the son of a wealthy family, in cold blood, before being lynched by a mob.

One of his few redeemable characters was in Home of the Brave (1949), the first Hollywood movie to deal overtly with racial prejudice, Bridges being the only buddy of a black soldier in a five-man on a Japanese-held island. It was produced by

Stanley Kramer and written by Carl Foreman, both of whom went on to make High Noon (1952). In this classic group western Bridges played Marshall Gary Cooper's deputy, who refuses to support his superior against a group of gunmen out of both jealousy and cowardice. There is a bitter irony in the fact that the film made an intentional analogy with McCarthyism.

It was soon after making The Rainmaker (1956), in which he played spinster Katherine Hepburn's obdurate brother, that he landed the role of Mike Nelson, the former Navy frogman in the underwater adventure TV series Sea Hunt, which made him a household name. (Both his sons, Beau and Jeff, got their first parts as kids in the series.) After four years of tackling sharks, both animal and human, rescuing people from perils at sea, Bridges announced he was leaving the show. "They wanted more cops and robbers," he explained. "I wanted to look at the real villains of the sea, like the oil companies."

In addition to his acting, Bridges was active in the support of many social and environmental causes and, in 1988, he headed a mission to investigate starvation in sub-Saharan Africa. By this time he had embarked on his new self-parodic career, launched by Airplane, in which he was the chain-smoking, heavy-drinking ground control official. This was followed by Airplane II: The Sequel (1982), causing more chaos in mission control than in the doomed space ship.

In June 1992 Bridges underwent open-heart surgery, but was back at work in six weeks on Hot Shots Part Deux (1993) playing Tug Benson, the sort of crazy American officer that makes both friends and foes quake with fear.

Bridges, who leaves his wife, two sons, a daughter and 11 grandchildren, recently completed two forthcoming features, Jane Austin's Mafia and Meeting Daddy, the latter with his elder son Beau.