The Hollywood idol, Victor Mature, who died on August 4th, aged 84, often provoked a derisive response. One critic claimed that "the very name Victor Mature captures the brawly, if somewhat seedy, appeal of this performer", while another called him "a beautiful hunk of junk."
Giving his reasons for not enjoying the screen epic Samson And Delilah, Groucho Marx quipped: "No picture can hold my interest when the leading man's bust is bigger than the leading lady's."
However, Victor Mature was not averse to lampooning his own beefcake image. In Vittorio de Sica's After The Fox (1966), he portrayed a wrinkle-conscious, ham actor on the skids, in sunglasses, trenchcoat, and slouch hat from the 1940s; and in Bob Rafelson's Head (1968), billed as the Big Victor, he suffered the surreal indignity of having the Monkees playing dandruff in his greasy hair. "I was a marvellous freak," he once claimed.
Although his large girth, hooded eyes and solemn basso voice often teetered on the absurd - appropriately, he was asked to play the father of Sylvester Stallone in the 1980s - when he was given meaty, rather than beefy, roles, and got the chance to work with good directors, he was no joke. As the consumptive, heavy-drinking Doc Holliday, in John Ford's My Darling Clementine (1946), he was unforgettable.
Born in Louisville, Kentucky, the son of a scissors grinder, he had no education beyond the age of 14, having been expelled from most of the schools he attended. But he gained free tuition at the Pasadena Playhouse Drama School at the age of 20. After appearing in some 60 stage productions, the actor - already a substantial figure at 16 stone and 6 ft 3 in - was offered a film contract by Hal Roach.
Despite all his theatre work, his first leading film role consisted merely of grunts, groans and gestures as a Stone Age man in One Million BC (1940). He then returned to the Broadway stage, and the role of the movie heartthrob Randy Curtis, in the Kurt Weill-Moss Hart musical Lady In The Dark (1940). At the time, in a letter to his wife Lotte Lenya, Weill wrote: "Our car looks beautiful and glamorous like Victor Mature." Meanwhile, the "beautiful and glamorous" actor had signed a long-term contract with 20th Century Fox, where, for 13 years, "I did what I was told to do and kept my mouth shut." After serving with the US coastguards during the second World War, he returned to Fox, where his career gained a boost from My Darling Clementine and Henry Hathaway's Kiss Of Death (1947).
In Robert Siodmak's neon-lit crime thriller Cry Of The City (1948), he played a police officer, Lieutenant Candella, whose task in hunting down a local hoodlum, Martin Rome (Richard Conte), is complicated by the fact that the pair were boyhood friends in the same Little Italy neighbourhood. Surrounded by corruption, Victor Mature was authoritative as the ethical centre of the film. He was then loaned out to Paramount Pictures for his most famous part, playing opposite Hedy Lamarr in Cecil B. DeMille's Samson and Delilah (1949). Dressed in a loin cloth, with his hair in a pony tail, and wearing a head band, he seems, at first, prematurely blind by preferring Angela Lansbury to Lamarr. Henceforth, despite a number of roles in lounge suits, he had become to the toga what Dorothy Lamour was to the sarong. In the first, yawning CinemaScope feature, The Robe (1953), he was imposing and touching as a Greek slave to Richard Burton's Roman centurion - the only role he later enjoyed seeing himself in.
Before his virtual retirement from the screen in the early 1960s - to become a highly successful businessman - he made a number of lacklustre, action movies, many of which had one-word exotic titles such as Safari, Zarak, Timbuktu and Hannibal, in which he gave one-dimensional performances, his great baroque slab of a face attempting to register heroism. "I just have the kind of expression which makes me look as though I smell something bad," he once said, disarmingly.
Victor Mature, who kissed some of Hollywood's most gorgeous leading ladies - including Lamarr, Grable, Rita Hayworth (in My Gal Sal, 1942) and Jane Russell (in The Las Vegas Story, 1952) - was married and divorced five times. He is survived by his daughter Victoria.
Victor Mature: born 1915; died August, 1999