Don Murray, an actor who earned an Oscar nomination for his movie debut as a naive cowboy infatuated with Marilyn Monroe’s third-rate nightclub singer in “Bus Stop” and then rebelled against studio efforts to typecast him in similar roles, most emphatically by playing a U.S. senator being blackmailed for a same-sex affair in “Advise & Consent,” died Feb. 2 at 94.

A representative for his son, actor Christopher Murray, confirmed the death but did not share details.

With his lean 6-foot-2 build, square jaw and dimpled smile, Murray appeared ideally suited to play the rowdy Montana wrangler in “Bus Stop” (1956). Trailers promoted him – roaring an exuberant yeehaw and lassoing Monroe – as “Hollywood’s newest hunk of man.”

But beyond heartthrob looks, Murray had little in common with the impetuous cowboy he played on-screen. He was an earnest, introspective performer who pursued a wide range of roles in a screen career spanning seven decades. He was also, at various times, a writer, director and producer of movies imbued with social messages – the immorality of capital punishment or the power of faith, among other themes.

A conscientious objector during the Korean War, he joined the Church of the Brethren and helped the pacifist Christian denomination resettle Soviet bloc refugees in the 1950s. Pained by their plight as they faced life behind barbed wire or in barracks, Murray – by then a bona fide star – helped purchase about 130 acres on the Italian island of Sardinia in 1957 and gave it to displaced people to farm.

“When I got into ‘Bus Stop,’ the fame of Marilyn Monroe was so amazing in Italy that her name opened doors for me to politicians,” Murray told Newsday in 2016. “I would ask them where’s the best place to buy land, and then they would ask me what was it like to kiss Marilyn Monroe. We wouldn’t have gotten anywhere if it wasn’t for her.”

“Bus Stop,” William Inge’s hit Broadway play, was purchased by Twentieth Century-Fox studios mainly to please Monroe, who had tired of playing voluptuous airheads. She had taken a leave from Hollywood to study at the Actors Studio workshop in New York, and “Bus Stop,” with its balance of romantic comedy and subtle dramatic currents, became a showcase of her new range and sureness as a performer.

Murray, who had acted on Broadway with Helen Hayes, Mary Martin and Maureen Stapleton, was imported from New York because director Joshua Logan admired his intensity and felt he would not be intimidated by a glamorous movie star.

Mostly, Murray remembered trying to be gallant after Monroe, in pursuit of realism, wanted to do a bed scene in the nude, as he tried frantically to keep her from accidentally exposing herself. “She kept rolling around in bed,” he told columnist Earl Wilson years later. “I was holding the sheet over her bosom.”

Despite his leading role, Murray received an Oscar nomination for best supporting actor (he lost to Anthony Quinn as artist Paul Gauguin in “Lust for Life”). He then considered what to do with his newfound recognition.

The actor he most admired, he told the online publication Film Talk, was Gérard Philipe, a French leading man of the late 1940s and 1950s who glided with ease among romantic dramas, comedies and action fare and seemed to Murray thoroughly believable in every role. Murray aspired to the same versatility.

Immediately after “Bus Stop,” he played a frustrated New York accountant struggling with the temptation to cheat on his wife in “The Bachelor Party” (1957), a boys’-night-out drama with a forceful script by Paddy Chayefsky. That same year, he portrayed a Korean War veteran hiding the shame of his drug dependency from his wife (Eva Marie Saint) in “A Hatful of Rain.”

He told Newsday that he turned down the lead role of Brick in a 1958 screen adaptation of Tennessee Williams’s melodrama “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” a part that went to Paul Newman, “because I didn’t want to follow the dope addict in ‘A Hatful of Rain’ with another introverted, repressed kind of a character.”

Instead, Murray agreed to what he called a “pacifist” western – “From Hell to Texas” (1958) – and then the 1920s Irish Republican Army drama “Shake Hands With the Devil” (1959), co-starring James Cagney. After being asked to appear in two middling westerns, Murray bought out the remainder of his six-year contract at Twentieth Century-Fox and made a tentative deal with another studio, United Artists, to make his own movies.

His first, “The Hoodlum Priest” (1961), centered on the Rev. Charles Dismas Clark, a real-life Jesuit priest who ministered to thousands of street-gang members and ex-cons in St. Louis in the postwar years. Murray starred in, produced and co-wrote the film after a chance encounter with Clark at a movie premiere in St. Louis.

The film earned critical praise and was a commercial success, but Murray disagreed with UA over what to do next. “They wanted to start with a western and a cop-and-robbers film, but those two stories were not unique,” he said to Newsday. They turned down his request to focus on two socially conscious dramas, one focused on race relations.

“They rejected my two and I rejected their two,” he said, “and that was that.”

Murray went on to play a rising Utah senator and family man who is blackmailed because of a past sexual liaison with a man in “Advise & Consent,” a 1962 Washington drama about a confirmation battle.

Before filming, Murray recounted to the Los Angeles Times, producer-director Otto Preminger cautioned him that other stars had turned down the role. In an era of extreme anti-gay prejudice legally and otherwise, the gay subplot was considered risky.

“Do you think that playing a homosexual will hurt your career?” Preminger asked.

“Do you think playing a Nazi hurt your career?” Murray said he replied, noting Preminger’s memorable performance as a Nazi POW camp commandant years earlier in the film “Stalag 17.”

More than the “Advise & Consent” role, Murray said his performances as unconventional men of the cloth – in “The Hoodlum Priest” and as Norman Vincent Peale in “One Man’s Way” (1964) – gave his screen persona an air of moral superiority that set back his Hollywood career as a bankable leading man. It took his performance as an authoritarian human ruler in “Conquest of the Planet of the Apes” (1972), he said, for the cloud of righteousness to disperse.

An upbringing in show business

Donald Patrick Murray was born in Hollywood on July 31, 1929, and grew up in East Rockaway, on Long Island. His father, a former movie dance director, became stage manager for shows such as “Hellzapoppin,” the Broadway romp starring the comic duo Chic Johnson and Ole Olsen. His mother had once performed in the Ziegfeld Follies.

“We were constantly exposed to these fascinating people,” he told Newsday. “And those Olsen and Johnson people were insane, I mean, gosh, one week we’d have a 600-pound man at our house, and the next week we’d have a woman who played violin with boxing gloves on … and they were all our friends. My childhood was a great childhood. It was like a combination of Ringling Brothers circus and Huck Finn.”

He attended the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in Manhattan and won his first significant role, as a virginal sailor, in Williams’ “The Rose Tattoo,” which played on Broadway in 1951.

Critics singled out Murray for his touching performance, but his career was interrupted when he was drafted during the Korean War. Declaring himself a conscientious objector – he said he renounced violence after a brutal fight at age 14 – he spent two years under investigation by the FBI before a prosecutor decided the actor’s antiwar beliefs were sincere.

For nearly three years, he did social work in Europe through a group affiliated with the Church of the Brethren before resuming his stage work. He was appearing in a 1955 Broadway revival of Thornton Wilder’s “The Skin of Our Teeth” when Logan spotted him and cast him in “Bus Stop.”

His marriage to actress Hope Lange ended in divorce. In 1962, he married Elizabeth Johnson, a model and actress. He had two children from his first marriage, including Christopher, and three children from his second. Complete information on survivors was not immediately available.

In a busy career that included occasional stage roles, Murray starred in the Cold War thriller “Escape From East Berlin” (1962), played a soft-spoken sheriff opposite Steve McQueen’s parolee in “Baby the Rain Must Fall” (1965), was a vigilante cop in “Deadly Hero” (1976) and was Kathleen Turner’s father in the comedy “Peggy Sue Got Married” (1986). He also directed and co-wrote “The Cross and the Switchblade” (1970), starring singer Pat Boone as a New York City preacher who works to help drug addicts and gang members.

In addition to his many TV guest parts and movies of the week, Murray starred with Otis Young in the interracial ABC western series of the late 1960s “The Outcasts” and played the ill-fated car dealer Sid Fairgate from 1979 to 1981 on the CBS nighttime soap opera “Knots Landing.” He also had a recurring role as a pugilist-turned-insurance-company-executive in the late 2010s Showtime reboot of the mystery crime drama “Twin Peaks.”

Murray said he aspired not to be a movie “personality,” but rather a wide-ranging and consistent actor.

“When I first came into movies,” he said in a 2014 documentary biography, “Unsung Hero,” “actors tended to find a role that resonated with the audience and then they’d repeat that same kind of role again and again and again. …. I wanted to do every time the opposite of what I had done the last time.”