Van Heflin

Born Emmett Evan Heflin in Walters, Oklahoma, the son of a dentist, he had a genuine taste for adventure, shipping out as a merchant seaman in his youth before earning a degree and studying drama at Yale. That seafaring toughness never left him; he was stocky, plain-featured, and utterly believable, an actor who looked like he could actually do the jobs his characters held.

Broadway noticed him first, and Katharine Hepburn personally championed him for the film version of The Philadelphia Story. Hollywood soon rewarded him: he won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor as the alcoholic, philosophizing sidekick in Johnny Eager (1942). Rather than push for conventional stardom, Heflin embraced the role of the dependable leading man and character actor, valued by directors for the reality he brought to everything.

He served in the Army Air Forces during the war, then returned to a rich run of postwar work. He was superb as the tormented husband in the noir Possessed and the vengeful gambler of The Prowler, but he is best loved for two Westerns. In Shane (1953) he played the homesteader Joe Starrett, the ordinary decent man whose quiet strength is the film's true moral center, and in the original 3:10 to Yuma (1957) he was the desperate, drought-ruined rancher who guards a charming outlaw for the reward, a study in worn-down courage.

Heflin worked steadily on stage and screen through the 1960s, and his final film role was as the deranged bomber aboard the imperiled jetliner in the blockbuster Airport (1970). Soon after, he suffered a heart attack while swimming and died at sixty-two. He never sought the spotlight, and perhaps for that reason is under-celebrated today, but among those who study the era he stands as a model of unglamorous integrity, the actor who made ordinary men matter.