Joel Albert McCrea (November 5, 1905 – October 20, 1990) was an American actor whose career spanned a wide variety of genres over almost five decades, including comedy, drama, romance, thrillers, adventures, and Westerns, for which he became best known.

He appeared in over one hundred films,[1] starring in over eighty, among them Alfred Hitchcock's espionage thriller Foreign Correspondent (1940), Preston Sturges' comedy classics Sullivan's Travels (1941), and The Palm Beach Story (1942), the romance film Bird of Paradise (1932), the adventure classic The Most Dangerous Game (1932), Gregory La Cava's bawdy comedy Bed of Roses (1933), George Stevens' six-time Academy Award nominated romantic comedy The More the Merrier (1943), William Wyler's These Three, Come and Get It (both 1936) and Dead End (1937), Howard Hawks' Barbary Coast (1935), and a number of Westerns, including Wichita (1955) as Wyatt Earp and Sam Peckinpah's Ride the High Country (1962), opposite Randolph Scott.

As a high school student McCrea worked as a stunt double[4] and held horses for Hollywood cowboy stars William S. Hart and Tom Mix.

[6] In the 1930s, McCrea starred in the pre-code film, Bird of Paradise (1932), directed by King Vidor, co-starring with Dolores del Río.

In RKO's The Sport Parade (1932), McCrea and William Gargan are friends on the Dartmouth football team, who are shown snapping towels at each other in the locker room, while other players are taking a shower.

[12] Later in the decade he was the first actor to play "Dr. Kildare", in the film Internes Can't Take Money (1937), and starred in two large-scale Westerns, Wells Fargo (1937) with his wife Frances Dee, and Cecil B. DeMille's Union Pacific (1939).

McCrea turned down playing in a number of films; he was offered the lead role in The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946) but he refused, saying "This character is too much of a gigolo.

During World War II, McCrea refused to portray military heroes, with the explanation, "Since I was too old to be called, I was too old for that kind of a show".

McCrea also starred in two William A. Wellman Westerns, The Great Man's Lady (1942), again with Stanwyck, and Buffalo Bill (1944), with character actor Edgar Buchanan and a young Maureen O'Hara.

A few years later, McCrea united with fellow veteran of Westerns Randolph Scott in Ride the High Country (1962), directed by Sam Peckinpah, after which he did not make another feature film until The Young Rounders (1966).

[7] McCrea – who was an outdoorsman who had once listed his occupation as "rancher" and his hobby as "acting" – had begun buying property as early as 1933, when he purchased his first 1,000 acres (400 ha) in a then unincorporated area of eastern Ventura County, California, which later became Thousand Oaks.

[25][26] In a story originally published in 1954, McCrea said he was a man of faith, who relied on the guidance of God in his personal life and career, saying that through the years he followed the principle of "asking my way of Him."

"[27] McCrea made his final public appearance on October 3, 1990, at a fundraiser for Republican gubernatorial candidate Pete Wilson in Beverly Hills.

[2] He died less than three weeks later on October 20, at the Motion Picture & Television Country House and Hospital in Woodland Hills, Los Angeles, California, from pneumonia at the age of 84.

[6] After his death his family ultimately donated thirty-five acres (14 ha) of McCrea's former ranch to the newly formed Conejo Valley YMCA for the city of Thousand Oaks.