Actor Garner to receive lifetime achievement award

Actor James Garner is to receive United States Screen Actors Guild’s life achievement award.

Garner, 76, also won an Emmy as Jim Rockford, the laconic, underachieving private eye on television’s long-running 1970s hit The Rockford Files.

He was nominated for an Oscar as the small-town pharmacist who befriends single mom Sally Field in the 1985 film Murphy’s Romance.

He will be honoured at the guild’s February 5 awards ceremony.

Garner played an astronaut opposite Clint Eastwood in Space Cowboys, the president in My Fellow Americans, Mark Twain in Roughing It and God in the animated TV series God, the Devil and Bob.

He first gained fame as cowardly cowboy hero Bret Maverick – the western card shark who never met a gunfighter he wasn’t afraid to run from in the hit 1950s series Maverick.

He played an older, more settled version of the character in a 1981 version of the TV show, and was Marshal Zane Cooper opposite Mel Gibson’s Maverick in the 1994 film version.

Garner joined the cast of “8 Simple Rules” last year after the show’s star, John Ritter, died of a heart ailment.