Obituary

Lyle Bettger

1950s screen actor whose cold good looks almost always made him the villain of the piece

There were few film heavies who could sneer as convincingly as Lyle Bettger, who has died aged 88. The fact that he was fair-haired, with steely-blue eyes, and was handsome in a coldly Aryan manner, made him seem ideal to play Nazi officers. In the event, he only ever played crypto-Nazis.

He showed his nasty streak in his very first film, No Man Of Her Own (1950), in which he gets Barbara Stanwyck pregnant, then gives her a train ticket to take her as far away from him as possible. Years later, after she has made a new life for herself, he finds her and threatens to blackmail her unless she comes up with some cash.

This was followed by Union Station (1950), in which he kidnaps the blind daughter of a millionaire. Naturally, he dies in the end, shot by cop William Holden after an exciting underground chase. Dying on screen was something he did exceptionally well.

In Cecil B DeMille's circus epic The Greatest Show On Earth (1952), he is Klaus, the elephant trainer who is insanely jealous of his partner in the act, Gloria Grahame. In one scene, he is stopped at the last moment from letting his huge elephant squash sexy Gloria's head. Happily, in the end, he is killed by the circus train while driving on the tracks.

Bettger was an all-American boy, born in Philadelphia, the son of St Louis Cardinals' third baseman Franklin Bettger. At the age of 20, he "got serious" about acting and enrolled in the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York city. After graduation in 1937, he struggled for a few years before reaching Broadway. His biggest roles were in Norman Krasna's comedy John Loves Mary (1947), in which he played Lieutenant O'Leary, a character described by the playwright as "25, handsome in a smirking way, and too self-assured" and in the Elia Kazan production of the Alan J Lerner-Kurt Weill musical Love Life (1948). These led to a movie contract with Paramount.

The first of Bettger's many Western villains was in Denver And Rio Grande (1952), about railroad rivalry, and he is the cause of The Great Sioux Uprising (1953), stealing ponies from the Indians and selling them to the army. He causes another Indian uprising in The Lone Ranger (1955), when he breaks a treaty so he can mine their silver in their sacred mountain.

He was baby-faced Audie Murphy's nemesis in Destry and Drums Across The River (both 1954) and Alan Ladd's in Guns Of The Timberland (1960). In John Sturges' Gunfight At The OK Corral (1956), Bettger was Ike Clanton, the irredeemably crooked rancher and head of the gang confronting Wyatt Earp (Burt Lancaster) and Doc Holliday (Kirk Douglas).

However, in Carnival Story (1954), set in Germany, it was, according to Bettger, "the first and only time in my recollection that I'm not the bad guy in a feature picture". He played a high diver in a circus, whose wife Anne Baxter lusts after cad Steve Cochran.

As Westerns were being phased out by the big studios in the 1960s, Bettger was able to continue his villainy in TV cowboy series such as Rawhide, Gunsmoke and Bonanza. To his great pleasure, he was also on the right side of the law in two TV crime series, The Court Of Last Resort (1957-58) and Grand Jury (1959-60).

While appearing in an episode of Hawaii Five-O in 1968, he and his wife and two sons, all of whom survive him, moved to Hawaii, where he continued in the series. Bettger retired in 1979, claiming: "On the whole, I enjoyed playing the villains, they're usually a better role in most cases than the leading man."

· Lyle Bettger, actor, born February 13 1915; died September 24 2003

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