All-around actor Van Johnson dies at 92

NEW YORK – Van Johnson, whose boy-next-door wholesomeness made him a popular Hollywood star in the ’40s and ’50s with such films as “30 Seconds over Tokyo,” “A Guy Named Joe” and “The Caine Mutiny,” died Friday of natural causes. He was 92.

Johnson died at Tappan Zee Manor, an assisted-living center in Nyack, N.Y., said Wendy Bleisweiss, a close friend.

With his tall, athletic build, handsome, freckled face and sunny personality, the red-haired Johnson starred opposite Esther Williams, June Allyson, Elizabeth Taylor and others during his two decades under contract to MGM.

He proved to be a versatile actor, equally at home with comedies (“The Bride Goes Wild,” “Too Young to Kiss”), war movies (“Go for Broke,” “Command Decision”), musicals (“Thrill of a Romance,” “Brigadoon”) and dramas (“State of the Union,” “Madame Curie”).

During the height of his popularity, Johnson was cast most often as the all-American boy. He played a real-life flier who lost a leg in a crash after the bombing of Japan in “30 Seconds Over Tokyo.” He was a writer in love with a wealthy American girl (Taylor) in “The Last Time I Saw Paris.” He appeared as a post-Civil War farmer in “The Romance of Rosy Ridge.”

More recently, he had a small role in 1985 as a movie actor in Woody Allen’s “The Purple Rose of Cairo.”

A heartthrob with bobbysoxers – he was called “the nonsinging Sinatra” – Johnson married only once. In 1947 at the height of his career, he eloped to Juarez, Mexico, to marry Eve Wynn, who had divorced Johnson’s good friend Keenan Wynn four hours before.

The marriage produced a daughter, Schuyler, and ended bitterly 13 years later. “She wiped me out in the ugliest divorce in Hollywood history,” Johnson told reporters.

Though he hadn’t lost his boyish looks, Johnson’s vogue faded by the mid-’50s, and the film roles became sparse, though he did have a “comeback” movie with Janet Leigh in 1963, “Wives and Lovers.”

Also in the 1960s he returned to the theater, playing “Damn Yankees” in summer theaters. Then he accepted a two-year contract to star in “The Music Man” in London.

He explained why in an interview: “Because the phone didn’t ring. Because the film scripts were getting crummier and crummier. Because I sat beside my pool in Palm Springs one day and told myself: ‘Van, you’ll be 45 this year. If you don’t start doing something now, you never will.’ ”

For three decades he was one of the busiest stars in regional and dinner theaters.

“The white-haired ladies who come to matinees are the people who put me on top,” he said in a 1992 interview. “I’m still grateful to them.”