Actor in ‘Spartacus’ was U.S. ambassador to Mexico
John Gavin, a Hollywood actor who had major roles in the Roman epic “Spartacus” and Alfred Hitchcock’s classic thriller “Psycho” before being named U.S. ambassador to Mexico, where he had a tumultuous five-year tenure in the 1980s, died Friday at his home in Beverly Hills, Calif. He was 86.
Gavin found modest success as a contract actor at Universal studios, where he was sometimes hailed as “the next Rock Hudson.” Gavin had the lead role in “A Time to Love and a Time to Die” (1958), playing a German soldier returning to his ravaged homeland and falling in love during World War II. He received a Golden Globe Award as most promising new actor.
The film’s director, Douglas Sirk, next cast Gavin as Lana Turner’s suitor in the 1959 melodrama “Imitation of Life,” which explores issues of racial identity. In 1960, he played Julius Caesar in Stanley Kubrick’s Oscar-winning “Spartacus,” alongside Kirk Douglas, Tony Curtis and Laurence Olivier.
The same year, Gavin appeared in Hitchcock’s “Psycho” as Sam Loomis, the lover of Janet Leigh’s character, Marion Crane. In a climactic scene in the film, he ends up at the Bates Motel with Marion’s sister, played by Vera Miles, and has a chilling encounter with Norman Bates, the murderous character portrayed by Anthony Perkins.
In other film roles, Gavin appeared with such acclaimed actresses as Sophia Loren, Susan Hayward and Doris Day, yet never broke through to mass stardom.
In 1980, he campaigned for his old friend from Hollywood, Ronald Reagan, the Republican nominee for president. After Reagan won the election, he nominated Gavin, who had no previous diplomatic experience, as ambassador to Mexico.
The Senate confirmed Gavin for the post in 1981. From the beginning, as the Los Angeles Times noted five years later, “he displayed an instinctive ability to antagonize just about everyone whom diplomats usually try to cultivate.”
He was absent from Mexico a third of the time, often spending four-day weekends in Los Angeles. He insulted journalists from both Mexico and the United States, telling some that he knew their bosses and could get them fired.
When Gavin resigned his ambassadorship in 1986, a column in Mexico City’s El Universal newspaper described him as “arrogant, imprudent and meddlesome” and as “one of the most ghastly ambassadors” to Mexico in years.