Hollywood Western Hero, Joel Mccrea, Dies At 84

LOS ANGELES - Joel McCrea, a real-life cowboy who became one of the best of Hollywood's make-believe saddle heroes, died yesterday at the Motion Picture and Television Hospital in Los Angeles. He was 84.

Eileen Singer Brown, hospital supervisor, said Mr. McCrea died at 4:50 a.m. yesterday of pulmonary complications. She said he had been a patient only a short time, and that his wife, actress Frances Dee, had been at his bedside.

Tall, good-looking and good-humored, Mr. McCrea may have ranked just behind John Wayne as the most believable of Western heroes. During a career that spanned three decades, he made 86 motion pictures.

And, although best remembered for his cowboy roles, he was a versatile actor who handled frivolous light comedy and adventurous melodrama with the same skill he brought to Westerns. Some of his best known films were such Westerns as ``The Virginian,'' ``Union Pacific'' and ``Wells Fargo,'' and such thrillers as Alfred Hitchcock's ``Foreign Correspondent,'' and such comedies as Preston Sturges' ``Sullivan's Travels.''

He had worked in at least three pictures with his wife, one of the most sought-after leading ladies of the 1930s.

Gossip columnists often referred to their union as ``an ideal Hollywood marriage.'' They were married in 1933, and were together until his death.

One of their three sons, Joel Dee, who is known as Jody, played the deputy in Mr. McCrea's 1959-60 television series ``Wichita Town.''

Off-screen, he was as low-key and down-to-earth as he appeared before the cameras - a working rancher, a shrewd businessman and a public-spirited citizen active as a school-board trustee and community leader in Ventura County, Calif.

Mr. McCrea was born Nov. 5, 1905, in nearby South Pasadena, the son of a successful executive. His Western heritage was strong: his maternal grandfather, Major Albert Whipple, came to California during the Gold Rush in a covered wagon, and his paternal grandfather, Major John McCrea, was a stagecoach driver.

The McCrea family moved to Hollywood when Joel was 8 or 9, and it was then he first came into contact with film figures - he delivered the Los Angeles Times to such moguls as Sam Goldwyn and Jesse Lasky, and such stars as William S. Hart and Wallace Reid.

``I learned a good deal about life - and Hollywood - back then,'' Mr. McCrea reminisced many years later. ``There were certain stars, supposed to be worth millions, who couldn't dig up the 60 cents which the Times cost then, at the end of the month.''

Possibly because of such experience, the lanky, adventurous youngster was less starstruck than horse-struck. He loved and understood horses - and started hanging around the back lots of Hollywood, volunteering as a ``horse holder'' for cowboy stars Tom Mix and Hart, one of his newspaper customers.

As a youth, he started working summers as a cowboy on the King Cattle Co. ranch in the Tehachapi Mountains.

His father eventually talked him out of the cowboy phase of his life.

He graduated from Hollywood High School, and enrolled at Pomona College. It was there he began acting in amateur roles.

He decided he liked the acting life and after college graduation in 1928 began haunting the studios and picking up occasional work as an extra.

His first feature role came in 1929 in ``The Jazz Age,'' and in the same year he played ``So This Is College,'' ``Dynamite,'' and ``The Silver Horde.'' He began winning star roles the next year.

Critics consider that his career peaked in the 1940s with ``Foreign Correspondent,'' ``Sullivan's Travels'' and ``Palm Springs Story.''

But the general public undoubtedly remembers him best in big budget Western epics because his open, honest face, easygoing manner and relaxed seat on a horse combined to make him more at home on the range than almost any other actor.

As producer Harry Sherman once put it: ``Joel is the greatest natural Western star since the old days of Tom Mix and William S. Hart. He has an authentic background, and he is one of the finest natural horsemen I've ever seen. . . . Just a guy who knows how to sit on a horse with grace and authority.''

Or, as an admiring columnist expressed it: ``A horse to him was like a sonnet to Keats.''