Will Hutchins, who had a comically genteel starring role during the craze for television westerns in the 1950s, playing a sheriff who favored cherry soda over whiskey on “Sugarfoot,” died on April 21 in Manhasset, N.Y., on the North Shore of Long Island. He was 94.
The cause was respiratory failure, his wife, Barbara Hutchins, said in a funeral home death notice.
In 1958 and ’59, eight of the top 10 shows on TV were westerns. The best known included “Cheyenne” and “Maverick.” Mr. Hutchins was part of the stampede: “Sugarfoot” premiered on ABC in 1957 and ran for four seasons.
The show was produced by Warner Brothers, which took its name and theme music from an otherwise unrelated 1951 western movie starring Randolph Scott. The title refers to a man of the Wild West who seems so unsuited to shootouts and cattle wrangling that he cannot be called even a “tenderfoot.”
Mr. Hutchins’s character, Tom Brewster, was the sugarfoot in question: an Eastern law student seeking his fortune as a sheriff who sidles up to the saloon bar to order a sarsaparilla (Wild West root beer) “with a dash of cherry.” He abhors violence, tries to stop women from throwing themselves at him and lovingly gives up his share of drinking water for his horse.
Mr. Hutchins played the role for comedy, following up a villain’s insult with a dramatic pause, only to critique the man for not being “sociable.” Other dramatic moments prompted him to lecture Westerners about problems with their “disposition.”
Pushed to the limit, he would reveal himself to be a roundhouse puncher and unmatched gunslinger — but he was likely to end a fight not with a killing but rather a comment like, “All right now, how about that apology?”
The wholesome fare seemed believable coming from Mr. Hutchins, who dyed his hair blond, accentuating his “farm-fed boyish good looks,” as The Clarion-Ledger of Jackson, Miss., put it. “Hokey it might have been, and hokey it remained,” the newspaper said of “Sugarfoot,” “because being hokey is being Will Hutchins.”
As the world of TV changed in the 1960s, Mr. Hutchins found work in a couple of short-lived situation comedies, “Hey, Landlord” (1966-67) and “Blondie” (1968), adapted from the comic strip.
He also crossed over into film, appearing in two Elvis Presley vehicles, “Spinout” (1966) and “Clambake” (1967), and in “The Shooting” (1966), a western directed by Monte Hellman and starring Jack Nicholson. It did not gain wide theatrical release but nonetheless enjoyed “enormous underground success,” The New York Times reported in 1970.
Mr. Hutchins sensed a clear decline. After “Sugarfoot,” “I was turned down more than a motel bedspread,” he told the syndicated columnist Joan Crosby in 1966.
He often referred to a business manager who embezzled his savings and a girlfriend who drove off with his Porsche and a prized signed picture of Elvis.
In 1973, he took on a new kind of acting: For $50 a week, minus $5 for a circus agent, he began working as a clown. He traveled up and down the Pacific Coast, got a long-term gig roaming around small-town Australia and then circled the globe, traveling to Sri Lanka and England.
He told The Australian Women’s Weekly in 1981 that the best advice he had received about comic performance was to act as if you were doing something no less severe than “Hamlet.”
“In order to make people laugh, you have to act seriously,” he said. “Chaplin was just as sad as he was funny. Buster Keaton never smiled.”
Marshall Lowell Hutchason was born on May 5, 1930, in Los Angeles, where he grew up. His father, Lowell Bennett Hutchason, a dentist, died while he was in high school. As a young actor, he lived with his mother, Jane Webber, who taught bridge.
Bill Orr, who ran the television department of Warner Brothers, gave him his stage name because he thought that his birth name was too long, Mr. Hutchins later wrote.
He was a corporal at the NATO headquarters, in Paris, during the Korean War. With help from the G.I. Bill, he attended the film school at the University of California, Los Angeles. His acting there drew the attention of Warner Brothers.
In 1965, he married Chris Burnett, the younger sister of the actress and comedian Carol Burnett. They had a daughter, Jennifer, and divorced after a few years. In 1988, he married Barbara Torres. His wife and daughter survive him.
Looking for work in the 1980s, Mr. Hutchins became a shipping clerk at NBC at his wife’s suggestion. He retired in 1996. He lived in the Glen Head section of Oyster Bay, a town on Long Island, where he could often be seen sitting on his porch wearing a cowboy hat.
He wrote essays about his life and times in show business for the website Western Clippings.
“Yesiree, Bob, the TV cowboy craze had raced across the nation like a prairie fire and just as quickly had gone up in smoke,” he wrote in 2009. “Never before in history were so many horses unemployed.”
Alex Traub is a reporter for The Times who writes obituaries.
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