A descendant of Supreme Court Justice John Marshall, this veteran of over 40 films is best remembered as the star of "Daktari", a popular family TV series set in Africa that ran on CBS from January 1966 to January 1969. The inspiration for the show was the feature film "Clarence the Cross-Eyed Lion" (1964) which Thompson starred in and co-wrote.Cast in naive juvenile roles in MGM films of the 1940s, Thompson began playing a wide variety of roles as a mature lead or second lead. He appeared in Vincente Minnelli's "The Clock" (1945), John Ford's "They Were Expendable" (1945), William Wellman's
