TG4 IS currently re-running the classic TV western series The Virginian and the show’s star James Drury - who played the title role throughout the show’s nine year run - has now come to Ireland to meet some of the show’s many fans, as well as his own Irish cousins.
On Monday morning in the Meyrick Hotel, Drury, wearing the obligatory black stetson, happily shared his memories of his time on The Virginian – and more besides.
Drury was born in New York in 1934 where his father was a marketing professor but spent much of his childhood in Oregon, where the family owned a couple of ranches. After completing his college studies, Drury embarked on a career as an actor and soon found himself being cast in westerns.
“All my training was in Shakespeare and Shaw and thought I’d be doing serious drama,” he recalls, “but they took one look at me, put a gun in my hand and said ‘Get up on that horse!’ So I’ve spent most of my motion picture career on the back of a horse, but I’ve no regrets about that!”
It was while he was signed to a contract with Universal Studios that Drury was sent to test for the lead role in The Virginian.
“I was over-weight when I first tested,” he reveals, “so they sent me away and told me to come back. In 30 days I managed to lose 30 pounds and on the Friday night before the Monday when the show was due to start filming I was told I had the part – and Doug McClure (who played Trampas ) was told he had his part at the same time.
“We hadn’t worked together before, but we met up in a coffee shop and realised immediately we had a real chemistry together. So we just set out and worked our butts off and before we knew it we had a big hit on our hands.”
The Virginian had perhaps the most demanding production schedules in the of network television.
“It was a 90 minute show and we had five days a week to make them,” Drury explains. “Sometimes we had four separate units all working at the same time shooting different episodes, so we’d be going from one to the other.
“We worked from five in the morning till nine at night, five days a week and then at the weekend you’d be learning your scripts for the following week. It meant you had no real home life and my marriage suffered – both my first and second marriages blew up while I was with the show. However, then I met the girl of my dreams in Houston, Texas, and we’re celebrating our 29th wedding anniversary this week here in Ireland!”
While we’ve all heard tales of on-screen buddies who couldn’t stand each other in real life, Drury and his Virginian co-star Doug McClure remained the best of friends.
I talked to him three times a week for 30 years until he died and I miss him terribly,” Drury declares. “He was like another brother to me. It was a real friendship between us.”
Despite the show’s gruelling schedule, Drury and McClure relished the experience, and the opportunity it gave to work with many of the illustrious actors who did guest slots on the show.
“We were glorying in it. We were the only people in the world who had a weekly 90 minute show with continuing characters,” says Drury. “They said it was impossible to do, but we showed it wasn’t if you worked hard enough. Moment to moment, working with people like George C Scott, Colleen Dewhurst, Ralph Bellamy, Robert Redford, George Kennedy, and Harrison Ford.
“You’re in situations where you’re looking into the eyeballs of these people and know you’ve got to come up to their level – and be above it! We did a show with Bette Davis and she kind of adopted Doug and me and would phone up to ask how the show was going, and so on. Then we did a show with Joan Crawford and I never could get Bette on the phone again, as long as I lived! Those two ladies did not care for each other one bit!”
Does Drury have a particular favourite episode from The Virginian?
“For me, the show where everything came together perfectly was one called Felicity’s Spring,” he states. “It was an episode where the Virginian fell in love but the girl died of a mysterious illness before the show was over. You always had to have that requirement, because the Virginian was this romantic figure so he had to seem available.
“The actress in that episode was Katherine Crawford. She was a very stand-offish woman and I instinctively didn’t like her. We worked together but barely spoke apart from that. Yet funnily enough in the years afterward we actually did become very good friends. That episode remains my favourite.”
Aside from The Virginian, Drury also played a key role in one of Sam Peckinpah’s early westerns, Ride The High Country.
“That was a great experience, I had all these wonderful actors around me in that film,” he says. “I’d worked with Peckinpah before in an episode of the western series Trackdown which he’d written and directed. Sam and I were good friends and maybe if I hadn’t got the role of The Virginian I’d have gone on working with him in his other films.”
Drury is enjoying his visit to Ireland, which has been arranged by Irish-American publican Eamon Finnerty.
“We were very much aware of our Irish background growing up, Dad talked about it all the time,” he states. “My grandfather, who was an attorney, was very active in Irish affairs and back in the 1920s he raised $30,000 to send back to Ireland for ‘the cause’. So here we are, my wife and I, re-establishing a link with the past. I’m dying to meet my cousins in Roscommon. We’re having a wonderful time here already!”
James Drury will be attending the Galway Races today to meet fans of the show.
