The Life of a Movie ‘Maverick’

Charming as ever, James Garner sits down for a low-key chat with Robert Osborne on a new installment of the cable interview series “Private Screenings” (5 and 8 p.m., TCM).

Garner, 73, who moved from Oklahoma to California in 1945 and says he “did a little bit of everything” before finally getting into acting, has always preferred work to interviews (“I got tired of talking about myself”).

Here, of course, the popular leading man must do most of the talking, which yields reflections on his childhood (he was an introvert) and early days in the business, which included $500 a week as the star of the hit western “Maverick.”

Garner on acting: “When I was 50, I realized I might have a career here.”

On William Wyler, who directed him in “The Children’s Hour,” a 1961 film with Shirley MacLaine and Audrey Hepburn: “He had a way of communicating; it just wasn’t that verbal.”

On “The Great Escape,” the splendid World War II drama directed by John Sturges: “One of the few pictures that I’ll watch that I’m in.”

His favorite film? That’s “The Americanization of Emily” opposite Julie Andrews, though Garner doesn’t feel he did justice to the script by Paddy Chayefsky. “I felt I was very inadequate.”

Garner, who always speaks his mind, also recalls the time he angered short-tempered studio chief Jack Warner in the 1950s, when a magazine reporter asked what it was like to be under contract to Warner Bros.

“Well, I feel like a piece of ham in the smokehouse and when they want to sell some, they come out and take you off the hook, chop off a hunk and hang you back up in the smokehouse.”

Maverick indeed.