Ruggedly handsome star who entered film as a bit player in 1929 as a result of a chance meeting with Howard Hughes. Scott proved himself a versatile lead in the mid-1930s and played several military heroes during and after the war years, before settling into a popular niche as a weathered, quiet-talking cowboy. Some of Scott's best work came in the late 1950s, when he formed the Ranown production company with Harry Joe Brown and starred in a series of adult-oriented westerns directed by Budd Boetticher. He turned in an engagingly self-effacing swan song as the aging gunslinger in Sam Peckinpah's valentine to the genre, "Ride the High Country" (1962).