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Although he geared himself up for major film stardom throughout the 1950s, it took a leading role on a 1960s TV series opposite a lion and chimpanzee to make Marshall Thompson a genuine household name. Born on November 27, 1925 and named James Marshall Thompson after an ancestor, a famed Supreme Court justice, he moved with his parents from his Peoria, Illinois hometown to the Los Angeles area at age five where his father set up a successful Westwood practice in dentistry that continued for over three decades. His mother once took to the stage as a concert singer and musician. Marshall was their only child.

He caught the acting bug while in high school when he appeared in a number of school productions and was spotted by a local talent agent. This did not pan out but he also acted upon his early skills as a writer. The Westwood Village Players produced the young high school student`s ambitious three-act play "Faith," the story of two young aviators in a Nazi prison. He enrolled at Occidental College where he switched from pre-med to drama. He was also a member of the college`s cross-country team. The athletic, lanky-framed, good-looking collegiate was re-discovered while performing as one of the Occidental Players in 1944. This time, he made good and was signed to a Universal contract. He began in minor war-era films with Reckless Age (1944) starring Gloria Jean and was quickly brought over to MGM on the strength of this film.

With most big stars off to war, Marshall was given the chance to work quite steadily in perfunctory nice guy assignments such as Blonde Fever (1944), The Clock (1945), They Were Expendable (1945) and Bad Bascomb (1946) opposite Frances Rafferty. His first association with animals came with the lead in the horse-friendly yarn Gallant Bess (1946), MGM`s first film produced in CineColor. The handsome Marshall went on to provide yeoman work in the war dramas Homecoming (1948), Command Decision (1948) and Battleground (1949), becoming an instant bobbysoxer idol to film fans. A genial player on screen, he managed to show potential outside his benign typecast in Dial 1119 (1950) as a cold-hearted, baby-faced killer, and finished his MGM contract out with The Tall Target (1951) playing a potential assassin of Abraham Lincoln. Freelancing for the next several years after losing his contract to MGM due to a change of management, he assisted a few serious-minded dramas but a noticeable pall soon took over his career with "B" thrillers taking up the bulk of his time. He achieved a bit of cult infamy with the films Cult of the Cobra (1955) Fiend Without a Face (1958), It! The Terror from Beyond Space (1958) and First Man Into Space (1959). A couple of notable exceptions were his strong roles in the Audie Murphy starrer To Hell and Back (1955) and the Grande caccia, La (1957) [East of Kilimanjaro], in which he performed his own dangerous stunts and developed a lifelong passion for Africa and wildlife.

It was this aforementioned wildlife association, combined with TV, that made the biggest dramatic impact on his career. Throughout the 1950s Marshall appeared faithfully in small-screen presentations but in 1966, he was cast as a series lead, that of game warden Dr. Marsh Tracy in the African adventure "Daktari" (1966) developed by Ivan Tors and filmed at Africa, U.S.A., a wild-animal theme park near Los Angeles. Although overshadowed sometimes by those inveterate scene-stealers Clarence the Cross-eyed Lion an