http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/06/arts/television/hugh-obrian-dies-dashing-tv-star-of-wyatt-earp-was-91.html 2016-09-06 00:01:26 Hugh O’Brian Dies; Dashing TV Star of ‘Wyatt Earp’ Was 91 Mr. O’Brian played the title role in the western “The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp” from 1955 to 1961. === Hugh O’Brian, who rose to fame on television as the quick-drawing Wyatt Earp in the 1950s — but who later devoted extensive time to a foundation he created that trains young people to be leaders — died on Monday at his home in Beverly Hills, Calif. He was 91. His death was announced by his foundation, When he first arrived in Hollywood in 1947, Mr. O’Brian was a strapping 6-foot-plus presence with leading-man looks and a swagger he had picked up in the Marine Corps. He did not have movie stardom in mind, though: He was planning to return to college and eventually attend law school. Instead, he broke into show business by chance, when he escorted an actress to a rehearsal for a play and ended up with a part for himself, filling in for an actor who had fallen ill. The actress Ida Lupino, then just beginning her career as a director, cast him in her 1949 feature film, “Never Fear.” A contract with Universal-International Pictures soon followed. Early in his career, Mr. O’Brian was relegated mostly to secondary status in run-of-the-mill westerns — with Gene Autry in “Beyond the Purple Hills” (1950), Audie Murphy in “The Cimarron Kid” (1952) and Rock Hudson (to whom Mr. O’Brian was frequently compared) in “Seminole” (1953). He emerged from obscurity when he landed the title role on “ Mr. O’Brian would play that real-life lawman in one form or another several times during his career, most notably in the 1991 television movie “The Gambler Returns: The Luck of the Draw,” a vehicle for the singer Kenny Rogers, and “ Mr. O’Brian remained active through the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s, mostly on television. He appeared on series like “The Alfred Hitchcock Hour,” “Charlie’s Angels,” “Fantasy Island” and “Murder, She Wrote.” In 1972 he was one of the rotating leads in NBC’s short-lived high-tech private-eye series “Search,” which also starred Tony Franciosa and Doug McClure. Although most of Mr. O’Brian’s movies were westerns and other action-oriented features, he also acted in comedies, dramas and musicals, including “There’s No Business Like Show Business” (1954), “Come Fly With Me” (1963) and “Twins” (1988). He played Broadway too: In 1960 he briefly filled in for Andy Griffith in the musical “Destry Rides Again,” and a year later he portrayed the author Romain Gary in “First Love,” directed by Alfred Lunt and based on Mr. Gary’s memoir, “Promise at Dawn.” He toured with regional theater productions as well. But Mr. O’Brian’s portrayal of Marshal Earp, forever remembered for his participation in the 1881 As Mr. O’Brian told it, his high profile as a television star brought him to the attention of the Nobel Prize-winning doctor and missionary Albert Schweitzer, who in 1958 invited Mr. O’Brian to observe and work with him at the hospital he ran in Lambaréné, Gabon (then French Equatorial Africa). Inspired by the visit and by Dr. Schweitzer’s call to service, Mr. O’Brian returned to Los Angeles and, within weeks, established Hugh O’Brian Youth Leadership, a nonprofit organization that presents seminars that prepare high school students to “become positive catalysts for change.” The program, which began locally, eventually grew to national and international proportions and now claims more than 300,000 alumni, including Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor, who said his attendance at one of the organization’s leadership seminars in 1971 was “a genuine turning point in my life.” “Hugh O’Brian’s impact,” Mr. Huckabee said, is “a large part of why I became governor of my state.” Hugh O’Brian was born Hugh Charles Krampe on April 19, 1925, in Rochester, the son of Hugh and Edith Krampe. His father worked in sales, and the family moved frequently when he was a child. He attended several schools, including New Trier High School in Winnetka, Ill., and Kemper Military School in Boonville, Mo. His father, a former Marine (and, as Mr. O’Brian once described him, “one of the toughest men I ever knew”), inspired his interest in the military. But when he became an actor, he took the name O’Brian — from his mother’s side of the family, he said — because he found it less vulnerable than Krampe to unfortunate misspellings. Like those of the historic figure he portrayed on television, Mr. O’Brian’s accomplishments acquired some of the patina of legend, which in some cases he burnished himself. He claimed, for instance, to have been, at 17, the youngest drill instructor in Marine Corps history. (The Marine Corps does not track such statistics.) A bachelor for most of his life, Mr. O’Brian married his longtime companion, Virginia Barber, in 2006. To symbolize that this would be not just his first wedding but also his last, he held the ceremony at a cemetery, Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, Calif. In addition to his wife, Mr. O’Brian is survived by his brother, Don Krampe, a co-founder of his foundation and an unsuccessful Republican candidate for Senate in this year’s California primary. When Mr. O’Brian was interviewed by The New York Times in 2010, he spoke most passionately not about his career but about his philanthropic work. “I care first and foremost very, very much about this country,” he said, “and everything I’ve done in that area is trying to put something back into this country.”