LOS ANGELES — Clint Walker, the towering, strapping actor who handed down justice as the title character in the early TV western “Cheyenne,” has died, his daughter said Tuesday.
Walker died Monday of congestive heart failure at a hospital in his longtime home of Grass Valley, Calif., at age 91, his daughter, Valerie Walker, told The Associated Press.
“He was a warrior, he was fighting to the end,” said Valerie Walker, a retired commercial pilot who was among the first women to fly for a major airline.
Clint Walker, whose film credits included “The Ten Commandments” and “The Dirty Dozen,” wandered the West after the Civil War as the solitary adventurer Cheyenne Bodie in “Cheyenne,” which ran for seven seasons on ABC starting in 1955.
Born Norman Eugene Walker in Hartford, Ill., he later changed his name in both public and private life to the more cowboyish Clint.
He worked on Great Lakes cargo ships and Mississippi river boats and in Texas oil fields before becoming an armed security guard at the Sands Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas.
There, many Hollywood stars, including actor Van Johnson, saw the 6-foot-6, ruggedly handsome Walker and encouraged him to give the movies a try, which Walker said he did after realizing the money would be better and the bullets would be fake.
He soon found himself under consideration for his first role, in “The Ten Commandments,” starring Charlton Heston and Yul Brynner. He had a meeting with the film’s legendary director Cecil B. DeMille, but he was late after stopping to help a woman change a tire and feared he’d blown his shot.
“He just exuded power,” Walker said of DeMille in a 2012 interview for the archive of the television academy. “He looked me up and down and said, ‘You’re late, young man.’ ” “I thought, ‘Oh no, my career is over before it even started.’ ”
Walker explained why he was late and said DeMille responded, “Yes, I know all about it; that was my secretary.” Walker was cast as the captain of the pharaoh’s guard in the movie that came out in 1956.
Based roughly on a 1947 movie, “Cheyenne” began as an hourlong program that originally was alternated with two other Westerns.
