After an acting career, he served as an ambassador
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 fiveyear tenure in the 1980s, died Friday at his home in Beverly Hills, Calif. He was 86.
After serving as a Navy officer in the 1950s, Gavin was hoping to work as a technical adviser on a movie about an aircraft carrier. The film’s producer, an old family friend, suggested that the strapping, 6-foot-4 Gavin have a screen test.
He 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 Oscarwinning “Spartacus,” alongside Kirk Douglas, Tony Curtis and Laurence Olivier.
The same year, Gavin ap- peared in Hitchcock’s “Psycho” as Sam Loomis, the lover of Janet Leigh’s character, Marion Crane.
Gavin was scheduled to play James Bond in “Diamonds Are Forever” (1971) before Sean Connery was lured back with a hefty salary to play the role he had given up four years earlier. In 1973, Gavin was again set to portray Bond before the producers decided to go with British actor Roger Moore in “Live and Let Die.”
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 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.”