James Garner, the US star of hit TV series The Rockford Files and Maverick and films including The Great Escape, has died aged 86.
Garner had suffered ill health since a severe stroke in 2008.
"Mr Garner died of natural causes," the West LA Division of the Los Angeles Police Department told the BBC, adding his body has been released to his family by a doctor.
Garner famously played laconic private investigator Jim Rockford.
He won an Emmy for the role in 1977 and starred in 122 episodes of the hugely successful show from 1974 to 1980. He returned to it in the 1990s with eight Rockford Files TV movies.
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Watch James Garner as private investigator Jim Rockford in a scene from the hit 70s US TV show, The Rockford Files
Another role, as the poker-playing Bret Maverick in the Western comedy, was also a hit with TV viewers, running for 60 episodes from 1957 to 1962, and again for another 18 episodes from 1981 to 1982.
Richard Natale of Variety said that the role of the laid-back, work-shy Maverick fitted "his wry personality like a glove".
The TV show was made into a film in 1992 starring Mel Gibson and Jodie Foster, but also starred Garner - this time on the right side of the law, as Marshal Zane Cooper.
In 1963's iconic World War Two film The Great Escape, Garner played flight lieutenant Robert Hendley, an American in the RAF, alongside Steve McQueen, Richard Attenborough and Donald Pleasence.
The film depicted the daring escape by prisoners of war from the German Stalag Luft III camp through a 336ft (102m) long tunnel. Only three reached safety and of the 73 recaptured, 50 were shot.
Hendley's role in the film was as the "scrounger" who managed to get hold of identity cards, clothes and a camera. Garner
The actor was also Oscar-nominated for best actor in 1986 for the romantic comedy Murphy's Romance, co-starring Sally Field, in which he played a small town pharmacist.
Other leading ladies included Doris Day, who he starred with in the 1963 screwball comedy Move over Darling, and Julie Andrews, his co-star in gender-bending comedy Victor Victoria in 1982.
In an interview on US TV in 2002, he told Charlie Rose: "John [Sturges, Great Escape's director] was a great director and editor and he got the most out of his actors and I don't know how he did that, I think it was just pat on the back and that sort of thing."
He also admitted that he was "always nervous" when acting, adding: "Keeps me on my toes. I've never been that confident, I don't have the background in acting.
"Some people do, they went to all these classes," he said, explaining that he had initially felt "inferior" to more experienced actors, but that this quickly changed once he worked with them.
"A lot of people say you have to have this foundation, you have to have all the great teachers and all the great theory. I don't think so.
"When I was 25 when I first started acting I'd been around the world a little bit. I'd travelled in a lot of different societies. I felt I knew as much as any of these actors who'd been to acting school."
He also said in Steve Rubin's documentary Return to The Great Escape that he had real-life experience of scrounging during the Korean War, and so had used this for his role.
Garner had fought for the United States Army in Korea, and was injured in 1951. But it was not until 1983 that he received his medal, the Purple Heart.
Garner's career as an actor began after he won a role in the 1956 film Towards the Unknown, about a group of experimental aircraft test pilots at Edwards Air Force Base in the 1950s, when supersonic flight was in its infancy.
He was also uncredited as Bret Maverick in a 1957 episode of the TV series Sugarfoot, about a civil war adventurer who lacks cowboy skills but roams the West in search of adventure.
Garner's career peaked during his highly successful TV series, and he was nominated for nine Golden Globes for shows including The Rockford Files in 1980 and Maverick in 1982, having won in 1958 for most promising newcomer.
He also won a further two for TV series Decoration Day [1991] and Barbarians at the Gate [1994].
He starred with Sandra Bullock and Ellen Burstyn in mother-daughter drama Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, in 2002 and in 2005 he was given a Screen Actor's Guild lifetime achievement award.
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