LOS ANGELES -- Hollywood leading man Victor Mature, famed for his roles in the biblical epics of the 1940s and '50s, including "Samson and Delilah" and "The Robe," has died at age 86, a relative said on Monday. A cousin, Julia Mature of Louisville, Kentucky, said the actor died last Wednesday at his home in Rancho Santa Fe, near San Diego, after a three-year battle with cancer.

The news was not made public immediately pending funeral arrangements. The tall, dark and handsome Mature, was one of Hollywood's big stars of the postwar era. Studio publicity machines gave him titles like "The Hunk" and a "Beautiful Hunk of a Man." Critics were less admiring and dismissed his acting as wooden. Mature often said he was a better golfer than actor and was not above playing parodies of himself.

But some of his performances won high praise over the years, including his role as Doc Holliday in John Ford's classic western "My Darling Clementine," in which he played opposite Henry Fonda's Wyatt Earp. He also won praise for his work in the Betty Grable thriller of 1941, "I Wake Up Screaming," and in the 1947 film noir "Kiss of Death," in which Richard Widmark made his screen debut as a psychopath on the trail of Mature. Mature was born in Louisville, the son of Austrian immigrants.

He left school as a teenager to sell candy and started a restaurant before moving to Hollywood in the late 1930s to become an actor. He was soon making films for major studios like Rko and Fox and working for directors like Josef Von Sternberg and Cecil B. De Mille, who cast him as Samson in "Samson and Delilah." He appeared with such actresses as Rita Hayworth, Grable and Hedy Lamarr, Hollywood's idea of what Delilah looked like.

In 1983, he came out of retirement to play Samson's father in a TV remake of "Samson and Delilah." (Reuter)