James Drury

James Child Drury Jr. was an American actor born on April 18, 1934, in New York City, to James Child Drury, a New York University marketing professor, and Beatrice Crawford Drury. He grew up dividing his time between New York City and Salem, Oregon, where his mother owned a farm. At the age of 10, Drury contracted polio. He pursued formal training in drama at New York University and later completed his degree at UCLA after beginning his film career at MGM.

Drury's professional acting career began at age 12, when he performed in a road company production of Life with Father. He signed a film contract with MGM in 1954, appearing in small roles before moving to 20th Century Fox, where he had parts in Love Me Tender (1956) and Bernardine (1957). His television work in the late 1950s included guest appearances on Richard Diamond, Private Detective, the ABC Western series Black Saddle, the syndicated anthology Death Valley Days, and two episodes of the ABC Western series The Rebel. On November 16, 1960, he played pioneer Justin Claiborne in the Wagon Train episode "The Bleymier Story," and he appeared in the 1960 Disney film Pollyanna as George Dodds. In 1961, he guest-starred on Perry Mason as musician and defendant Eddy King in "The Case of the Missing Melody." In 1962, he took on a substantial role as a gold prospector in Sam Peckinpah's Ride the High Country, opposite Randolph Scott and Joel McCrea.

That same year, Drury secured the lead role of ranch foreman on NBC's Western series The Virginian, a part he won after auditioning three separate times and losing 30 pounds in 30 days to meet the production's requirements. He was placed under a seven-year contract with Universal in 1962. Drury reported that he modeled his portrayal of the character on his maternal grandfather. The series ran for nine seasons until 1971 and was reformatted in its final season as The Men from Shiloh. Drury is best known for this title role, which made him one of the prominent figures of the Western television genre. In April 1966, he and his Wilshire Boulevard Buffalo Hunters band performed 54 shows for troops in Vietnam over the course of three weeks.

Following The Virginian, Drury held the lead role of Captain Spike Ryerson in the ABC drama series Firehouse in 1974. In 1978, he appeared on Broadway in Neil Simon's California Suite. In 1991, he was inducted into the Hall of Great Western Performers at the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City. In 1993, he guest-starred as Captain Tom Price in the first three episodes of Walker, Texas Ranger, opposite Chuck Norris and Clarence Gilyard. He appeared in a cameo in the 2000 television film of The Virginian starring Bill Pullman, a production that followed Owen Wister's novel more closely than the original series had. His other credits include The Young Warriors and the television reunion film The Gambler Returns: The Luck of the Draw, which also featured Doug McClure, Clint Walker, and Hugh O'Brian. Drury also served as host and narrator for three PBS specials: River Invaders: The Scourge of Zebra Mussels (1994), Sturgeon: Ancient Survivors of the Deep (1995), and A Vanishing Melody: The Call of the Piping Plover (1997).

In his personal life, Drury married Cristall Othones on February 7, 1957, and the couple had two sons, Timothy and James III, before divorcing on November 23, 1964. He married Phyllis Jacqueline Mitchell on April 27, 1968, a marriage that ended in divorce on January 30, 1979. His third marriage, to Carl Ann Head on July 30, 1979, lasted until her death on August 25, 2019. Drury had three stepchildren: a stepdaughter, Rhonda Brown, and two stepsons, Frederick Drury and Gary Schero. His son Timothy Drury is a keyboardist, guitarist, and vocalist who performed with the rock groups Eagles and Whitesnake. James Drury died of natural causes on April 6, 2020, twelve days before what would have been his 86th birthday.