James Garner

It was natural for someone with his good looks and genial air to have been cast as heroes.

The image may not have been so different from reality. Garner does seem to have been humble enough to remember his past; according to the NYT, it included his leaving home home at 14 to escape abuse, then drifting for years before finding his way to acting.

And Garner was willing to step up as a citizen. As Soraya Nadia McDonald recounts—

When actor James Garner decided to help organize and attend the March on Washington in 1963, he wasn't just listening to his conscience. He and other actors who attended may have been embarking on Hollywood's first large-scale political act since the days of McCarthyism and Hollywood’s anti-Communist blacklist.

Garner's involvement was part of a long career of political activism. He told people he met his wife, Lois Clarke, at party for Adlai Stevenson, the liberal Democratic Party presidential candidate in 1952 and 1956. (Clarke gently corrected him in an appendix to his memoir, "The Garner Files" — they actually met at an earlier party, she said.)...

You have to admire a star who not only had the same wife for 58 years, but who wanted to say he had met her thanks to Adlai Stevenson!

Nelson continues—

...Though he believed in supporting causes political and environmental, Garner was staunchly against actors holding office for the most part. In "The Garner Files," the self-identified "bleeding-heart liberal" wrote:

Too many actors have run for office. There's one difference between me and them: I know I'm not qualified. In my opinion, Arnold Schwarzenegger wasn't qualified to be governor of California. Ronald Reagan wasn't qualified to be governor, let alone president. I was a vice president of the Screen Actors Guild when he was its president. My duties consisted of attending meetings and voting. The only thing I remember is that Ronnie never had an original thought and that we had to tell him what to say. That's no way to run a union, let along a state or a country.

This long Wiki page adds—

The "most explosive revelation" in his autobiography was that Garner smoked marijuana for much of his adult life. "I started smoking it in my late teens," Garner wrote. "I drank to get drunk but ultimately didn't like the effect. Not so with grass. It had the opposite effect from alcohol: it made me more tolerant and forgiving. I did a little bit of cocaine in the Eighties, courtesy of John Belushi, but fortunately I didn't like it. But I smoked marijuana for 50 years and I don't know where I'd be without it. It opened my mind and now it eases my arthritis. After decades of research I've concluded that marijuana should be legal and alcohol illegal."

I best remember Garner in the role he named his favorite. (Co-star Julie Andrews said the same of her part.) It's understandable that the actors felt that way about this one.