"I didn't start out wanting to be an actor," said Chuck Connors when interviewed in the mid 1960's. By that time the 6' 5" New Yorker had starred in two popular TV Western series, firstly as widower Lucas McCain in 'The Rifleman' -which ran from 1958 to 1963 on US television- and then as Jason McCord in the short lived but now fondly remembered 'Branded', the tale of a US Army captain accused of cowardice.

Connors was the son of an Irish immigrant from Newfoundland and was born in Brooklyn in 1921. His parents christened him Kevin and the youngster grew up determined to be a sports star. "I was crazy about sport at school. I was always kinda big for my age, and I guess sport came natural to me." Indeed, young Kevin Connors proved himself to be an outstanding athlete and eventually became a favourite of baseball and basketball fans as a player for the Brooklyn Dodgers, the Chicago Cubs and the Los Angeles Angels.

"I was thirteen when this guy came into my life," Connors recalled. "I remember one afternoon playing with a ball in the street when I saw these kids, a whole bunch of them, coming down the road carrying gloves, bats and baseballs. So I followed them and found out they called themselves the Celtics. John Flynn ran the club and he was like a father to them. John told me to grab a glove and take part in the game." John Flynn, a bank-teller by day, was to have a profound influence not only on young Chuck's life, but also on that of the entire Connors family. "In those days jobs were scarce and like a lot of families we were poor and living on relief. My sister and I didn't realise how poor we were. My dad had been out of a job for a long time." But John Flynn used his contacts to get Chuck's father a job in the police force. "Dad held on to the job that John got him from 1935 to 1960, when he retired." Flynn also coached the young Chuck until he got his first professional break.

When he eventually joined the Los Angeles Angels he became a favourite of many top Hollywood actors and moviemakers who were basketball fans. But service in the army disrupted his basketball career and following his spell at West Point Military Academy he was asked to play small guest roles in a number of movies. "I had never trained or studied to become an actor, I just stood there in front of the camera's and did what came natural to me."

However, it's for his television work and not the movies that Connors will be mostly remembered. Between his two best remembered TV series Chuck also starred as defence attorney John Egan in a 1964 series entitled 'Arrest and Trial', an innovative drama series that set the pattern for crime movies for years to come. In the 1970's Chuck resurfaced in the outstanding mini-series 'Roots', and continued to make guest appearances on popular shows such as 'The Six Million Dollar Man,' 'Fantasy Island' and 'Murder, She Wrote,' until his death in 1992.

Although he himself was the first to recognise, and indeed acknowledge his dramatic limits as an actor, he knew those limits and was always careful to work within them. The result was a string of consistently professional performances, which have helped to make the shows he starred in as watchable today as when they were first presented.