Rockford Filed

(Kudos to Monty)

James Garner, who lived through the hell of having to read a sappy Nicholas Sparks story over and over again in The Notebook, has died of a massive heart attack at the age of 86. Garner brought a series of knights in slightly dinged armor to life on TV as Bret Maverick and Jim Rockford, and in movies like Murphy’s Romance (winning an Academy Award nomination) and as the Scrounger in The Great Escape. Continuing his string of roguish characters, he played a con man turned city councilor in Man of the People, and the ultimate con man in the animated short-lived series God, the Devil and Bob, while on the big screen, he played a crooked lawman / con man / Bret Maverick’s father in Maverick and a disgraced former president in My Fellow Americans. Other roles included a Supreme Court justice in First Monday and one of Clint Eastwood’s Space Cowboys. In 2003, he was cast as Gibbs’ father on NCIS but suffered a stroke and was unable to take the role, which meant he was later available to help prop up 8 Simple Rules (for Dating My Teenage Daughter) after the sudden death of John Ritter.