James Arness, 1923–2011

In 1955, when CBS first offered James Arness the part of Marshal Matt Dillon in a new television Western called Gunsmoke, he declined. His career as a movie actor was just taking off, with well-received roles in the 1951 science-fiction classic The Thing From Another World and in 1954’s Them! But John Wayne, with whom Arness had starred in Big Jim McLain, sat him down. “Go ahead and take it, Jim,” Wayne advised the 6-foot-7-inch Arness. “You’re too big for pictures. Gregory Peck and I don’t want a big lug like you towering over us.”

Born James Aurness in Minneapolis, Arness and his brother, the actor Peter Graves, grew up enjoying what he called “a real Huckleberry Finn existence,” hunting, fishing, and exploring along the banks of the Mississippi River, said the Chicago Sun-Times. He enrolled at Wisconsin’s Beloit College but left during his freshman year after he was drafted into the Army in 1942. He was wounded during the battle of Anzio, leaving him with a permanent limp.

At a friend’s suggestion, Arness moved to Hollywood in 1946, said the Los Angeles Times. The next year he met producer Dore Schary, who cast him in The Farmer’s Daughter, starring Loretta Young. A series of small parts followed, but none that suited him so well as the starring role in Gunsmoke, “which earned praise for breaking TV Western-genre conventions with strong dramatic stories and psychologically complex characters.”

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As Matt Dillon, Arness “was the embodiment of quiet moral authority, a sensitive arbiter of conflict in a rough-and-ready cow town,” said The Washington Post. The show logged 635 episodes over a 20-year run, the longest ever for a prime-time scripted program until it was eclipsed by The Simpsons in 2009. The marshal’s relationship with Miss Kitty, owner of the town’s saloon, was the subject of rampant viewer speculation. They shared a single on-screen kiss in 1973.