American actor on-screen from 1944 in feature films, including “How to Marry a Millionaire” (1953) and “River of No Return” (1954). Calhoun co-produced and starred in the CBS western television series “The Texan” (1961). Dark and handsome, he was one of TV’s most suave villains in the ’70s.
Calhoun was born to an unmarried 16-year-old school girl. His father, James McCown, was a gambler who drowned at sea when Francis was 9 months old. He was raised in Santa Cruz, California, where he and his mother moved when he was five. His mother remarried, and he occasionally went by the name Frank Durgin, using the last name of his stepfather.
As a youth, he went through a series of jobs that included logging the California redwoods, punching cows in Arizona, hauling nets on a fishing boat – and spending time in reform school for theft, over seven years off and on. Acting was one vocation he never considered until the day he met Alan Ladd on a bridle trail one day while riding, and Ladd, sizing up the tall, good looking man, invited him to meet his agent-wife, Sue. He was signed by 20th Century Fox for his first role in 1944, “Something for the Boys.”
In 1948 he met Lita Baron; they married the following year. During the ’50s, his career flourished, but faded during the following decade.
When divorced after 21 years of marriage in 1970 on charges of adultery with 79 women, he said, “Hell, 79? Twice that.” Lita got custody of their three daughters, and Calhoun was remarried the following year to a much younger woman. He had another daughter and divorced in 1976, and then had a fifth daughter.
On 28 April 1999, he died of emphysema and diabetes in Los Angeles, aged 76.
Link to Wikipedia biography