Hugh O’Brian obituary

The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp, television’s first western aimed at adults, starred Hugh O’Brian, a rugged, 6ft-tall former marine drill instructor, who has died aged 91. He played the old west law enforcer, quick on the draw with his trusty long-barrelled Buntline Special Colt 45.

Through more than 220 episodes (1955-61), he was seen keeping order in Ellsworth, Kansas, then Dodge City and, finally, Tombstone, Arizona. Although folk-hero fiction was embroidered into the action, the programme aimed at authenticity, basing Earp on Stuart N Lake’s definitive 1931 biography of the American marshal who dressed impeccably in a frock coat, ruffled shirt, flowered silk vest, string tie and black sombrero. All that O’Brian did not copy was Earp’s handlebar moustache.

“I’m convinced that he was a thoroughly honest man, righteous and utterly fearless,” said the actor. “He was also just. In 200 gunfights, he killed only four men.”

Taking a percentage of the programme’s profits, O’Brian invested wisely in a building firm, a hotel, men’s toiletries and a company renting guns to TV western producers. Later, he reprised the role of Earp in two 1989 episodes of Guns of Paradise and the TV movies The Gambler Returns: The Luck of the Draw (1991) and Wyatt Earp: Return to Tombstone (1994).

O’Brian was born in Rochester, New York, the son of Edith (nee Marks), who was half-German and half-English with Scottish ancestry, and Hugh Krampe, a US marine corps officer turned sales executive whose parents were German immigrants.

He attended New Trier high school, Winnetka, Illinois, and two military academies – Roosevelt, in Aledo, Illinois, and Kemper, in Boonville, Missouri. He left the University of Cincinnati after only one semester to enlist in the US Marine Corps (1943-47) and, at 17, became one of its youngest drill instructors in the second world war.

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When peace came, he had plans to study law and headed to Los Angeles to earn money to help him through Yale. However, he decided on acting as a career when a girlfriend was cast in the Somerset Maugham play Home and Beauty at the Wilshire Ebell theatre, Los Angeles, in 1947. He found himself standing in for the leading man when the star fell ill and, seeing his surname misspelled for publicity purposes as Krape, decided to switch to O’Brien – from his mother’s family – but another misspelling led it to become O’Brian, which he kept. Stage work continued in Los Angeles, as well as Santa Barbara.

His lean, athletic physique led him to be cast as a sailor in the 1948 film version of Kidnapped, then he played a polio victim in Never Fear (1949). A contract with Universal International meant appearances in 18 supporting roles between 1951 and 1954, when he went freelance but found himself still playing second fiddle to stars such as Robert Wagner. TV and Wyatt Earp changed all that and he was a regular on the small screen for 40 years. His most significant film role came in The Shootist (1976), as the last character shot by John Wayne on screen.

In 1958, O’Brian spent nine days working as a volunteer at Dr Albert Schweitzer’s mission hospital on the banks of the Ogooue river in Gabon, Africa. Within weeks, he was inspired to set up Hoby – Hugh O’Brian Youth Leadership – which has helped almost 400,000 15 and 16-year-olds to develop their talents in leadership, service and innovation. He was also a founder of the charity Thalians, formed in 1955 to raise money for children with mental health problems, and established the Hugh O’Brian Acting Awards competition at the University of California, Los Angeles in 1964.

A 1969 paternity suit judged him to be the father of Hugh Krampe Jr, the 16-year-old son of a Los Angeles photographer, Adina Etkes. In 2006, at the age of 81, O’Brian married Virginia Barber, his partner of 18 years, who survives him.