Gary Clarke
Gary Clarke (born
Clarke Frederick L’Amoreaux;
August 16, 1933) is an American actor best known for his role as Steve Hill in the NBC western television series
The Virginian with James Drury and Doug McClure
.
Clarke began his screen career with the 1958 film
Dragstrip Riot, recalling that agent Byron Griffith, who had seen him perform in Glendale, arranged for an audition that eventually led to his filling the lead role. Clarke recalled:
I drove from San Gabriel to Hollywood and read for the part, and I got in as a member of the good gang. I went back to work the next day and my agent called me again and he said, ‘Gary, they have just lost the lead in the movie. Can you get down here?’ Yes! So I … went home [from work] and changed and went down, and I read every day for five days. I didn’t go back to work, I just kept calling in sick.
He went on to work in other films, including
How to Make a Monster, and
Missile to the Moon (both 1958),
Date Bait (1960), and
Passion Street, U.S.A. (1964). He has said he was a contract player at Universal Pictures.
In the 1960-1961 season, he appeared as Dick Hamilton in the single-season NBC television series
Michael Shayne, based on the fictional private detective character created by Brett Halliday, opposite Richard Denning as the title character. Afterward, he appeared as Tad Kimball, a friend of the character Jess Harper, played by Robert Fuller, in the episode “The Fatal Step” of the NBC Western series
Laramie.
Clarke played Steve Hill in the cast of the long-running TV Western series
The Virginian, remaining on the show from 1962 to 1964. His last series as a cast-member was the 1967 ABC Western
Hondo, playing Captain Richards.
Clarke said in an interview that his friend and co-star Steve Ihnat and he wrote the screenplay for director Ted V. Mikels’ film
Strike Me Deadly (1963),
though the film’s credits list only Ihnat and Mikels. Later that decade, Clarke under his birth name wrote several scripts for the NBC espionage sitcom
Get Smart, which introduced the running character Hymie the Robot. All but one of his six produced scripts for the series(“Appointment in Sahara”) is about Hymie.
In the 1980s and 1990s, he wrote and produced television
public-service announcements including “Youth at Risk”, narrated nonfiction short films including “Promoting Healthy Behavior”, and appeared in TV series including
Dynasty and
The Young Riders, in which he had a four-episode recurring role. His films in the 2010s include
The Paperboy (2012) and
Parkland (2013).
In 2014, the production company L’Amoreaux/Bartlett/Race/Thomas sought actors for an independent TV pilot,
Bandits, and Tadpoles, written by Bartlett and Thomas and directed by Clarke, about a young boy whose daydreams put him in the American Old West of the Owen Wister novel
The Virginian.
It filmed June 26–30, 2014, near Austin, Texas, under the title
Billy and the Bandit, with a cast including James Drury and Roberta Shore, from Clarke’s old series
The Virginian; 11-year-old Jordan Elsass as Billy; Ava L’Amoreaux and Donny Boaz as his parents; and Buck Taylor as a ranch foreman.
