LOS ANGELES, April 9 — John Agar, an Army sergeant whose 1945 marriage to Shirley Temple launched him on an acting career that began with classic John Ford Westerns and ended with schlock horror films, has died at age 81, friends said Tuesday.
The actor died of complications from emphysema at St. Joseph Medical Center in Burbank, his longtime friend, film producer A.C. Lyles, said.
Agar was a 24-year-old Army Air Corps sergeant when he married a then 17-year-old Shirley Temple, whom he had met through his sister who went to the same high school as the child star.
A movie contract soon followed and John Ford cast him opposite Temple and John Wayne in the Western classic “Fort Apache” in 1948. He appeared in four films with Wayne, Ford’s ”She Wore A Yellow Ribbon” and “Sands of Iwo Jima” as well as ”Chisum” and “Big Jake.”
Agar’s marriage to Temple ended in divorce in 1950 and his acting career went from Westerns and war films to science fiction and horror films,
The latter group including “Revenge of the Creature,” “The Mole People” and “The Brain from Planet Arous.” Critic Leonard Maltin said that Agar’s “outrageous overacting” in “Planet Arous” made it into a cult classic.
In recent years, Agar appeared in bit roles in TV shows and films and made frequent appearances at fan shows where science fiction devotees gave him star treatment.
He is survived by two sons and two daughters, two brothers and four grandchildren.
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John Agar played Thomas Malloy in The Pandora Directive. The Internet Movie Database lists his date of death as Sunday, April 7, 2002. He will definitely be missed.