RANCHO SANTA FE, Calif. (AP) -- Victor Mature liked to joke that he once tried to get into a country club that didn't accept actors by saying, "I'm no actor, and I've got 28 pictures and a scrapbook of reviews to prove it."
But the brawny actor given the nickname "beautiful hunk of man" also took his job seriously. "I just couldn't show it," he said.Mature died at the age of 86 after suffering from cancer for three years, said a friend, Zollie Volchok. The San Diego County coroner's office said it was notified that Mature died Wednesday.
Tall, dark-haired and muscular, Mature got his nickname from films like "Samson and Delilah," "One Million B.C." and "Song of the Islands."
He appeared in musicals, Westerns, comedies, historical epics and melodramas before largely retiring from films around 1960.
While first making his name as a glamour-boy star with a devil-may-care attitude, he gradually gained more critical respect in the late 1940s in such films as "Cry of the City" and "Kiss of Death."
In 1946's "My Darling Clementine," he was Doc Holliday to Henry Fonda's Wyatt Earp. The version of the fabled gunfight at the O.K. Corral is considered one of director John Ford's greatest films.
Cecil B. DeMille's 1949 telling of the saga of Samson and Delilah cast Mature and Hedy Lamarr in the title roles. It was a smash hit.
He was at 20th Century Fox for many years but often worked at other studios. "They turned pictures out like crackerjack," he told The New York Times in 1971. " 'Kiss of Death' got made because Fox was one black-and-white picture short on its schedule."
That 1947 film paired Mature with a screen newcomer, Richard Widmark. Mature played a thief who turned state's evidence, Widmark a psychopathic killer. The film caused a sensation and earned Widmark an Academy Award nomination.
At the height of his stardom, Mature dated stars such as Hayworth and Lana Turner.