Hugh O'Brian: R.I.P.

I'll always remember Hugh O'Brian as Wyatt Earp. My Dad, who loved mysteries, always loved Westerns, or as we called them in our household "Shoot 'Em Ups". Many a night I would watch with him, and Wyatt Earp was one of his favorites. News came yesterday that O'Brian died at the age of 91 from 'several health issues."

From The Rap Sheet:
O’Brian is most widely remembered for his lead role in the 1955-1961 ABC-TV Western, The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp. But he also starred in the 1972-1973 NBC-TV series Search, playing resourceful Hugh Lockwood, one of three field operatives assigned to solve crimes around the world for a high-tech private investigations enterprise. (Tony Franciosa and Doug McClure portrayed the other two ops.) In addition, O’Brian appeared over the years on such crime dramas as Perry Mason, Charlie’s Angels, Police Story, Matt Houston, L.A. Law, and Murder, She Wrote. In 1994 he reprised the small-screen role that brought him his first big fame, in Wyatt Earp: Return to Tombstone. His many theatrical film credits include parts in There’s No Business Like Show Business (1954), Come Fly with Me (1963), a 1965 picture based on Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Indians (aka And Then There Were None), and Twins (1988). “One of his more memorable roles (though it was also one of his smallest) was in John Wayne’s final movie, The Shootist (1976),” notes The New York Times. “Mr. O’Brian played a professional gambler who, in the film’s closing moments, became the last character ever killed onscreen by Wayne.”
 

Photo album: Wyatt Earp discovered in Antique Store

From the L.A. Times:

Two brothers find evidence of the personal life of legendary lawman, Wyatt Earp. He wasn't always a tough guy. Keith Collins and his brother Brian display photographs of Wyatt Earp as a boy and as a man. They were among many others in a photo album the brothers discovered in an antique store in Hesperia.

The photos, formal portraits taken by professional photographers, show subjects in their best clothes. The brothers say two of Earp's wives — Urilla Sutherland and Mattie Blaylock — are pictured. Missing is his third wife, Josephine "Sadie" Marcus, who was at his side when he died.

Also included are photos of Thomas Fitch, the lawyer who represented Earp in the judicial hearing after the 1881 gun battle at the O.K. Corral, and Calamity Jane, according to the brothers.

They speculate that Earp may have met frontierswoman Martha Jane Cannary in the Dakota Territory boomtown of Deadwood. Or Earp could have simply purchased the tintype: Calamity Jane sold them.

Read the rest of the story HERE.