Life and Career
Born as Marlin Jim Davis in Edgerton in Platte County in northwestern Missouri, he attended Baptist-affiliated William Jewell College in Liberty, Missouri.
His first major screen role was opposite Bette Davis in the 1948 melodrama Winter Meeting, a lavish failure for which he was lambasted in the press as being too inexperienced to play the part properly. His subsequent film career consisted of mostly B movies, many of them westerns, although he made an impression as a U.S. senator in the Warren Beatty conspiracy thriller The Parallax View.
In the episode "Little Washington" of the syndicated television series Death Valley Days, Davis portrayed a U.S. representative from Nevada with aspirations to become governor of the new state. Colllectively, Davis appeared ten times on Death Valley Days.
From 1954-1955, Davis starred and narrated the syndicated western television series Stories of the Century. He portrayed Matt Clark, a detective for the Southwest Railroad who works to bring notorious gunfighters and outlaws to justice. His costars were Mary Castle and Kristine Miller. Stories of the Century was the first western series to win an Emmy Award. Among the historical figures featured were John Wesley Hardin, Sam Bass, Doc Holliday, the Dalton Brothers, the Younger Brothers, Belle Starr, Joaquin Murietta, L. H. Musgrove and Clay Allison.
From 1958-1960, Davis starred as Wes Cameron opposite Lang Jeffries in the role of Skip Johnson in the syndicated adventure series Rescue 8. In 1962 he made a guest appearance on Perry Mason in "The Case of the Fickle Filly."
Davis appeared eleven times on Gunsmoke and four times each on Daniel Boone, Wagon Train and Laramie. In the next-to-the-last Laramie episode, entitled "Trapped" (May 14, 1963), he guest starred along with Tommy Sands, Claude Akins, and Mona Freeman. In the story line, Slim Sherman (John Smith) finds an injured female kidnap victim in the woods (Freeman). Dennis Holmes, as series regular Mike Williams, rides away to seek help, but the kidnappers reclaim the hostage. Slim pursues the kidnappers but is mistaken as a third kidnapper by the girl's father (Barton MacLane). Sands plays the girl's boyfriend, who had been ordered by her father to stop seeing her.
In 1974, he starred as Marshal Bill Winter in a short-lived ABC western series The Cowboys, based on a 1972 John Wayne film of the same name.
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“The true colour of life is the colour of the body, the colour of the covered red, the implicit and not explicit red of the living heart and the pulses. It is the modest colour of the unpublished blood.”
—Alice Meynell (1847–1922)
“It is a great many years since at the outset of my career I had to think seriously what life had to offer that was worth having. I came to the conclusion that the chief good for me was freedom to learn, think, and say what I pleased, when I pleased. I have acted on that conviction... and though strongly, and perhaps wisely, warned that I should probably come to grief, I am entirely satisfied with the results of the line of action I have adopted.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)