Victor Mature back

Victor Mature, the brawny Hollywood star of the 1940s and '50s, has died after losing a three-year battle against cancer. He was 86.

His best known film roles included Samson in Cecil B DeMille's Samson and Delilah (1949) and as Doc Holliday to Henry Fonda's Wyatt Earp in John Ford's Western masterpiece My Darling Clementine (1946). He was Hollywood's first leading man officially to boast the epithet "hunk" through a string of historical epics.

Other films were The Robe (1953), its sequel Demetrius and the Gladiators (1954) and One Million BC (1940), his first starring role, in which he played a caveman battling marauding dinosaurs. He made few films after 1960, preferring instead to play golf and live off his investments.

The San Diego County coroner's office said it was notified that Mr Mature died last Wednesday.

With his heavy-lidded eyes, full mouth and dark good looks, Victor Mature first made his name as a glamour-boy star with a devil-may-care attitude. But he was a much better actor than many early reviewers gave him credit for. He gradually gained more critical respect in the late 1940s in such films as Cry of the City and Kiss of Death.

He much enjoyed deflating the pomposity of Hollywood, as well as puncturing his own beefcake image. In Samson, he refused to wrestle with a live studio lion - whose teeth had been extracted - with the immortal words "I don't want to be gummed to death."

On another occasion, in order to get into a country club which barred actors, he said: "Hell, I'm no actor, and I've got 28 pictures and a scrapbook of reviews to prove it!"

He was 45 when he retired from the hectic studio treadmill, and lived comfortably, without extravagance, in Rancho Santa Fe, California. He once boasted that he spent four hours a day, six days a week, playing golf.

But he did return sporadically to the big screen, notably to send up his own movie persona in Neil Simon's 1966 Italian farce After the Fox, and in the Monkees' 1969 psychedelic romp Head.

Victor Mature was born 29 January 1913, in Louisville, Kentucky. His father was an Austrian immigrant who became a successful businessman. He did his bit during WW2 by joining the US Coast Guard. He arrived in California in the mid-1930s, where he studied at the Pasadena Playhouse, doing odd jobs and living in a tent on a vacant lot so as not to rely on hand-outs from his father.

He made his screen debut with a small role in The Housekeeper's Daughter, 1939.

He married five times and, at the height of his stardom, he dated some of Hollywood's most glamorous stars such as Rita Hayworth, his co-star in My Gal Sal (1942), and Lana Turner. He is survived by his opera-singer wife Lorey, and their daughter, Victoria.