Don Murray, the actor who earned an Oscar nomination for playing a rodeo cowboy smitten by Monroe in Bus Stop, then spurned Hollywood’s attempts to mold him, has died. He was 94.

Bus Stop
Theatrical release poster

Murray’s son Christopher announced his death to The New York Times without details.

The actor was also known for the interesting parts he went after in such serious films as A Hatful of Rain (1957), The Hoodlum Priest (1961) and Advise & Consent (1962).

Fresh off a starring role in a 1955 Broadway revival of Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth, Murray was sought by director Joshua Logan to portray Bo Decker, the naive Montana man who falls for the chanteuse Chérie (Monroe), in Bus Stop (1956). It was his first movie, and he was 26 at the time.

(Also in the film and making her movie debut was Hope Lange, his soon-to-be wife. Murray once said that Monroe wanted Lange’s hair dyed light brown, not wanting to share the screen with another blonde.)

Fox execs insisted Murray sign a long-term contract before giving him the role, but he resisted and got the studio to agree to a clause giving him time off if he wanted to return to Broadway.

The restless Murray ended up getting out of his contract early to do The Hoodlum Priest — which he wrote, produced and starred in. In the film, he played a Jesuit priest who dedicated his life to helping delinquents in St. Louis. He got Haskell Wexler to shoot it and Irvin Kershner to direct it.

In Fred Zinnemann’s A Hatful of Rain, based on the Broadway play by Michael V. Gazzo, Murray portrayed Johnny Pope, a Korean War veteran who returns home to his pregnant wife (Eva Marie Saint) with secret addiction to morphine. (Ben Gazzara had the role on the stage.)

Murray later took on an even more delicate role — that of an in-the-closet Utah lawmaker who is being blackmailed by a fellow senator — in Otto Preminger’s taut political drama Advise & Consent.

In From Hell to Texas (1958), directed by Henry Hathaway, Murray played a Bible-reading cowboy who goes on the run after he accidentally kills the son of a powerful rancher. Religion was a key element in many of his films.

Television audiences will best remember Murray as Sid Fairgate, the husband of Michele Lee’s character, on the CBS primetime soap Knots Landing. His character drove off the side of a cliff in the (literal) cliffhanger that ended season two in March 1981.

The son of a former Ziegfeld girl and a Broadway dance director, Murray was born on July 31, 1929, and raised on the outskirts of New York City, where he graduated from East Rockaway High School.

He then made it into the cast of the original 1951 Broadway production of Tennessee Williams’ Tony Award-winning The Rose Tattoo.

Universal offered him a contract for $150 a week, but he turned it down. “They could put you in whatever picture they wanted,” he said, and he wanted none of that, choosing to work in live TV.

Murray was a conscientious objector during the Korean War, but he spent nearly 3 years working in German and Italian refugee camps in the Brethren Volunteer Service, a forerunner to the Peace Corps. He came back to the U.S. in 1955.

Murray went toe-to-toe with James Cagney in Shake Hands With the Devil (1959) and played Norman Vincent Peale in One Man’s Way (1964).

Murray starred as a Civil War-era bounty hunter on the 1968-69 ABC series The Outcasts.

He co-wrote and directed The Cross and the Switchblade (1970), a true-life drama about a crusading New York minister (Pat Boone) that also featured Erik Estrada in his screen debut.

Murray was married to Lange from 1956 until their divorce in 1961.

He lived on a ranch in Goleta, California.

Murray married former model Bettie Johnson in 1962, and they had five children: Christopher (an actor); Sean (a composer); Patricia; Mick; and Colleen, who married artist and musician Chris Otcasek, the son of Ric Ocasek of The Cars.