Actor: Van Heflin

Van Heflin won Best Supporting Actor for Johnny Eager and spent a career playing ordinary men, which he preferred to conventional leading-man work.

Shane gives him the homesteader whose quiet decency is the film’s actual moral centre, though the audience watches Alan Ladd, and 3:10 to Yuma gives him a rancher taking an impossible job for money.

Airport was his last film, and he served as a combat cameraman in the Ninth Air Force during the war.