(URR here.) The dark, handsome western actor Hugh O'Brian, who portrayed Wyatt Earp in the long-running TV series, and who was the youngest-ever USMC Drill Instructor, has passed away at 91. Born Hugh Charles Krampe, son of a US Marine Captain, he dropped out of high school in 1943 to enlist in the Marine Corps.
O'Brian had a long career in cinema, and also holds the distinction of being the last guy a John Wayne character ever killed, in the 1976 classic The Shootist, in which he plays slick gunman Jack Pulford. When one of the men in the saloon challenges Pulford's claim that he could have taken J. B. Books (Wayne's character), Pulford has one of the great lines of western cinema:
You have two ways of leaving this establishment, my friend. Immediately or dead.
Rest in peace, Marine. Semper Fidelis.
XBradTC 
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