Rory Calhoun

The outlaw who seduced the camera

Rory Calhoun never made it to Hollywood by way of an acting school. An agent discovered him riding a horse in a public park in Los Angeles. He had a perfect face and a past that included car theft and stints in juvenile detention centers.

Francis Timothy McCown (his birth name) spent his youth going in and out of state prisons for armed robbery. In 1943, he was riding through Griffith Park when Sue Carol noticed him. They saw a diamond in the rough with a jaw of steel.

He was a truly dangerous man.

And so began an image makeover financed by the major studios. They changed his name, taught him how to walk and swept his criminal record under the red carpet. But his gaze always kept that glint of a man who has slept in a concrete cell.

The tough guy of Technicolor

His first big breakthrough came in 1954 with River of No Return. He worked alongside Marilyn Monroe and Robert Mitchum on a grueling shoot in the mountains of Canada. Director Otto Preminger made things hard for him, but Calhoun kept his cool and never complained.

Calhoun didn't let himself be intimidated by established stars. His physical presence was so commanding that audiences accepted any role he was given, as long as he wore a revolver on his belt. In 1955, he starred in The Spoilers and proved he could carry a big-budget film on his own.

He made more than eighty feature films over the course of his decades-long career. Most were quickly produced Westerns that are now studied pieces for fans of the genre.

The blackmail that couldn't break him

In the mid-1950s, a blackmailer threatened to publish his complete criminal record. Confidential magazine had documents from his years in prison and planned to use them to destroy his public image.

Hollywood initially bought his silence.

But the pressure was constant, so Calhoun decided to get ahead of the tabloids by confessing his past in a personal interview. To the producers' surprise, his popularity didn't drop; it immediately grew. Audiences of the time valued the redemption of a real-life outlaw.

In 1958, he starred in the series The Texan and became one of the most profitable faces on national television. He earned very high salaries for each thirty-minute episode. That contract allowed him to found his own production company to control his projects in the future.

His last appearance on the big screen was in 1992 with the movie Pure Country. He died in 1999 in Burbank from complications of diabetes and emphysema at the age of 76.