page_title: James Garner
section_title: The Rockford Files
hierarchical_section_title: James Garner / Career / The Rockford Files
caption_attribution_description: Photo of James Garner as Jim Rockford, Sian Barbara Allen as a newspaperwoman and Dave Morick as the county coroner from the television program The Rockford Files. In this episode, "Tall Woman in Red Wagon", Rockford's search for a missing woman takes him to a local cemetery.
context_page_description: James Garner was an American actor, producer, and voice artist. He starred in several television series over more than five decades, including popular roles such as Bret Maverick in the 1950s Western series Maverick and as Jim Rockford in the 1970s private detective show, The Rockford Files. He played leading roles in more than 50 theatrical films, including The Great Escape with Steve McQueen, Paddy Chayefsky's The Americanization of Emily with Julie Andrews, Grand Prix with Toshiro Mifune, Blake Edwards's Victor/Victoria with Julie Andrews, and Murphy's Romance with Sally Field, for which he received an Academy Award nomination. Garner's career and popularity continued through another decade in movies like Space Cowboys with Clint Eastwood, and The Notebook with Gena Rowlands.
context_section_description: In the 1970s, Roy Huggins had an idea to remake Maverick, but this time as a modern-day private detective. Huggins worked with co-creator Stephen J. Cannell, and the pair selected Garner to attempt to rekindle the success of Maverick, eventually recycling many of the plots from the original series, according to both Huggins' and Cannell's Archive of American Television interviews. Starting with the 1974 season, Garner appeared as private investigator Jim Rockford in The Rockford Files. He appeared for six seasons, for which he received an Emmy Award for Best Actor in 1977. In the 2016 book titled TV (The Book), film and television critic Matt Zoller Seitz stated that the series gave Garner "the role he was put on earth to play."
  Garner appeared with Mariette Hartley, who guest-starred in an episode of Rockford Files, in a lengthy series of extremely popular Polaroid Camera commercials. After six seasons, The Rockford Files was cancelled in 1980. Although low ratings were primarily to blame, the physical toll on Garner was also an issue. Appearing in nearly every scene of the series, doing many of his own stunts—including one that injured his back—was wearing him out. A knee injury from his National Guard days worsened in the wake of the continuous jumping and rolling, and he was hospitalized with a bleeding ulcer in 1979. When Garner's physician ordered him to take a break from the grind, the studio cancelled The Rockford Files.
  Margolin said of his longtime colleague that despite Garner's health problems in the later years of The Rockford Files, he would often work long shifts, unusual for a starring actor, staying to do off-camera lines with other actors, doing his own stunts despite his knee problems. When Garner later made The Rockford Files television movies, he said that 22 people (with the exception of series co-star Beery, who died late in 1994) came out of retirement to participate.
  In July 1983, Garner filed suit against Universal Studios for US$16.5 million in connection with his ongoing dispute from The Rockford Files. The suit charged Universal with "breach of contract; failure to deal in good faith and fairly; and fraud and deceit". Garner alleged that Universal was "creatively accounting", two words that are now part of the Hollywood lexicon. The suit was eventually settled out of court in 1989. As part of the agreement, Garner could not disclose the amount of the settlement.
  "The industry is like it always has been. It's a bunch of greedy people," he stated in 1990. Garner sued Universal again in 1998 for $2.2 million over syndication royalties. In this suit, he charged the studio with "deceiving him and suppressing information about syndication". He was supposed to receive $25,000 per episode that ran in syndication, but Universal charged him "distribution fees". He also felt that the studio did not release the show to the highest bidder for the episode reruns.
caption: Garner in the 1974 episode "Tall Woman in Red Wagon"
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