John Agar, whose marriage to actress Shirley Temple in the 1940s propelled him into an acting career that began promisingly with parts in two classic John Ford westerns but slid into low-budget science fiction movies in the 1950s and ’60s, has died. He was 81.
Mr. Agar died of emphysema Sunday in a hospital in Burbank, Calif.
During the 1950s and ’60s, Mr. Agar played lead roles in about two dozen sci-fi movies, including “Revenge of the Creature,” “Tarantula,” “The Mole People” and “The Brain From Planet Arous.”
Born in Chicago, Mr. Agar was the oldest of four children of a meatpacker. His father died in 1935, and the family later moved to Los Angeles.
Mr. Agar was a 24-year-old Army Air Corps sergeant when he married the 17-year-old Temple in 1945.
Mr. Agar’s sister was one of Temple’s classmates at Westlake School for Girls, and Mr. Agar had met the child star at a swimming pool party at her home in Beverly Hills.
After Mr. Agar returned to civilian life, producer David O. Selznick, who had Temple under exclusive contract, offered the handsome former GI a movie contract at $150 a week, acting lessons included.
Mr. Agar made his screen debut in 1948 as a young lieutenant in “Fort Apache,” starring John Wayne, Henry Fonda and Temple, who played Mr. Agar’s love interest. The following year, he co-starred with Temple in “Adventure in Baltimore,” a comedy. He also appeared in Ford’s “She Wore a Yellow Ribbon.”
In 1949, Mr. Agar’s four-year marriage to Temple, which produced a daughter, Linda Susan, ended in divorce.
He remarried in 1951, and he and his second wife, Loretta, had two sons. Loretta Agar died in 2000.
In 1951, Mr. Agar appeared in “Along the Great Divide” with Kirk Douglas. The same year, he co-starred with Lucille Ball in “The Magic Carpet,” a low-budget Arabian Nights adventure and the first of several minor fantasy and science fiction films he made during that period.
While under contract to Universal in the mid-1950s, Mr. Agar appeared in four movies. With the exception of a western called “Star in the Dust,” they were all sci-fi films.
By 1956, after the release of “The Mole People,” Mr. Agar was so tired of being typecast that, when the option on his contract came up for renewal, he left the studio.
Mr. Agar, however, worked into the 1990s, appearing in several films in the decades after he left Universal, including “Zontar the Thing From Venus” (1966), “The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre” (1967) and three more with Wayne: “The Undefeated” (1969), “Chisum” (1970) and “Big Jake” (1971).
He showed up in the 1976 remake of “King Kong,” as a New York City official. And in the 1980s and ’90s, filmmakers who had grown up watching Mr. Agar’s science fiction films cast him in small parts in such films as “Body Bags” and, most recently, “The Vampire Hunters Club.”
Mr. Agar is survived by two sons, a daughter, two brothers and four grandchildren.
