Van Johnson, 92, 1940s heartthrob film star

Van Johnson, shown with his wife, Evie, was a onetime Broadway chorus boy elevated to stardom during the war. (Associated Press/File 1948)

WASHINGTON - Van Johnson, a disarming and popular Hollywood star of 1940s musicals and comedies who later proved effective as a G.I. grunt in "Battleground" and a conflicted Naval officer in "The Caine Mutiny," has died. He was 92.

Mr. Johnson died yesterday at Tappan Zee Manor, a senior citizens home in Nyack, N.Y. No cause of death was immediately reported.

Starting in the late 1940s, Mr. Johnson took many viewers and reviewers by surprise for his dramatic performances.

He was especially good as a presidential candidate's wily campaign manager in Frank Capra's "State of the Union" (1948) with Spencer Tracy as his client. Mr. Johnson also portrayed a sneaky aide to a general in "Command Decision" (1948); and a cynical rifleman in William Wellman's "Battleground" (1949), a film praised for its harrowing depiction of combat during the Battle of the Bulge.

Mr. Johnson was singled out by critics as the executive officer who sells out the paranoid Captain Queeg (played by Humphrey Bogart) in "The Caine Mutiny" (1954), based on a best-selling novel by Herman Wouk. New York Times movie reviewer Bosley Crowther praised Mr. Johnson for conveying the "distress and resolution" required of the part.

All of those films almost totally reversed the screen persona Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio chief Louis B. Mayer first established for Mr. Johnson, a onetime Broadway chorus boy elevated to immediate stardom during World War II.

Injuries from a car crash prevented Mr. Johnson from being drafted during the war. In the absence of many male rivals, he was heavily promoted and became extremely popular.

Tall and freckled, with strawberry-blond hair, he was dubbed "The Voiceless Sinatra" because of his appeal among bobbysoxers.

He was an easygoing fit for musicals with Judy Garland ("In the Good Old Summertime"), Esther Williams ("Easy to Wed," "Thrill of a Romance," "Duchess of Idaho") and June Allyson and Gloria DeHaven ("Two Girls and a Sailor").

He also played romantically inclined wartime pilots in "A Guy Named Joe" and "Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo," both dramas in which he showed he could hold his own against costar Spencer Tracy.

In the second - in which Mr. Johnson played a pilot in the Doolittle raid over Japan - movie reviewer Crowther wrote that Mr. Johnson gave "a warm and brave performance and managed quite well to achieve a moving tenderness in love scenes and rigid strength in the action field."

Charles Van Johnson, whose father was a plumbing contractor, was born Aug. 25, 1916, in Newport, R.I.

His parents divorced, and he was raised by a strict father who discouraged his early interest in acting. His mother, an alcoholic, disappeared from his life until 1946, when he got her a studio job. She later sued him to increase her financial support, and they settled out of court.

While starring with Tracy and Irene Dunne in "A Guy Named Joe" (1943), he was in a car accident that resulted in a metal plate being inserted into his head.

Mr. Johnson reportedly turned down the role of Elliott Ness in the television crime series "The Untouchables" in 1959. His film work soon dwindled, but he returned for a small role in Woody Allen's "The Purple Rose of Cairo" (1985) as a patrician 1930s film character who has trouble improvising when one of the cast members (Jeff Daniels) jumps offscreen into reality.

Mr. Johnson began to call himself the King of Dinner Theater, as he spent decades as a fixture on the regional stage. He also became a mainstay of guest spots on television dramas, notably on "Murder, She Wrote," which starred his old MGM colleague Angela Lansbury.

Mr. Johnson had a famously difficult private life. He married Evie Abbott Wynn in Juarez in 1947 on the day her divorce became final from actor Keenan Wynn, who had been Mr. Johnson's best friend.

The Johnsons, who became known for hosting sumptuous Hollywood parties, were divorced in 1962 in a bitter proceeding. Their daughter, Schuyler, became estranged from her father and wrote a scathing first-person account of him in 2005 that appeared in the Mail on Sunday, a London newspaper.