Actor Forrest Tucker Dies at 67

Forrest Tucker, 67, who grew up in Washington, played football at Washington-Lee High School in Arlington, and, aided by rugged good looks, won success as an actor on stage, in the movies and on television, died Oct. 25 in a Woodland Hills, Calif., hospital.

At 6 feet 4 inches tall, the athletically built Mr. Tucker rode the range for years in Hollywood westerns and dished out and received plenty of punishment in a variety of action melodramas, in which he played both good guys and bad.

Subsequently, in a demonstration of his versatility an entertainer, he burst into song as the star of road company productions of "The Music Man." Still later, as his career turned toward comedy, he hatched devious schemes as a free-spirited cavalry sergeant in the television series "F Troop."

Mr. Tucker, who died at the Motion Picture Country Home and Hospital, had suffered from lung cancer for about a year, a family spokesman said. He entered a hospital on Aug. 21 for the second time in a week after he collapsed before a ceremony in which he was to receive the 1,830th star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

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Over the years Mr. Tucker, who once hosted a radio music and interview program in Chicago, made appearances on television talk shows, where he displayed some of the engaging crustiness that distinguished his film and television character roles and espoused a point of view he described as conservative.

Mr. Tucker was born in Plainfield, Ind., on Feb. 12, 1919, but came to Washington as a boy. He lived at 14th Street and Park Road for a time, and went to junior high school here.

In an early display of his affinity for show business, he concealed his age and found work as a master of ceremonies at the old Gayety Burlesque Theater here. After his ruse was discovered, he again used his height to disguise his youth and enlisted in the Army as an underage teen-ager.

While serving at Fort Myer, a former teacher recalled, he began attending Washington-Lee, where he won varsity letters in three sports and was known as scrappy, self-assured and universally popular.

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His performance in an amateur play led the teacher to recommend a theatrical career. After leaving the Army in the 1930s and attending George Washington University for a time, he found his way to Hollywood, where news accounts at the time indicated he got the kind of real-life break that usually occurs only in movies.

Four months after arriving in the film capital, Mr. Tucker, aided by acknowledged talent and a movie-star appearance, made some key connections, hooked up with an agent and found himself playing the second romantic lead in "The Westerner," which starred Gary Cooper.

Subsequent films in a career interrupted by his reentry into the Army during World War II included "Keeper of the Flame," "Renegades," "The Yearling," "Sands of Iwo Jima," "Rock Island Trail" "Bugles in the Afternoon," "Warpath," "Trouble in the Glen," "Three Violent People," "The Night They Raided Minsky's" and "Auntie Mame."

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From Sept. 14, 1965, to Sept. 7, 1967, he became known to prime-time television audiences as one of the stars of "F Troop," a lively farce in which he played Sgt. Morgan O'Rourke, who served in the cavalry and ran an illicit souvenir business on the side.

Earlier, he had starred as Professor Harold Hill in the title role of "The Music Man." When the show came to the National Theater here in the summer of 1961, Mr. Tucker's name went up on the marquee.

"If you don't think I get a thrill out of that you're crazy," he said at the time. "When I was a boy going to this theater I used to dream about it . . . . This really is it. The star of a big musical . . . in my own home town."

Earlier this year he married his fourth wife, Sheila Parker. Other survivors include three children from previous marriages.

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