LOS ANGELES — For nearly a decade, millions of Americans believed Dennis Weaver walked with a permanent limp, never suspecting that the actor had invented the disability himself during a single audition and carried it through nine years of television history.

Weaver, who died in 2006 at 81, is only now being fully understood as a man who lived what amounted to a double life: the beloved limping deputy Chester Good on “Gunsmoke,” and, behind the cameras, an Olympic hopeful turned actor, a quiet family man, and one of the earliest celebrity environmentalists in America.

The story of how a deliberate acting choice became a national misconception began in 1955, when Weaver auditioned for a new CBS western series. Producers initially rejected his reading. He asked for a second chance, dropped the formal stage technique he had learned at the Actors Studio, and slipped into the Oklahoma-inflected voice of his youth.

He won the part.

When a producer suggested Chester needed a distinctive trait to separate him from Marshal Matt Dillon, Weaver improvised a stiff-legged walk. He maintained the limp in every scene for nine years. The performance was so convincing that strangers approached him on the street to ask whether his leg had improved.

What almost no one knew was that Weaver had never planned to act for a living. Born Billy Dennis Weaver on June 4, 1924, in Joplin, Missouri, he grew up moving between Missouri, Louisiana and California as his father worked for a local electric utility. He fell in love with movies as a boy, but athletics soon eclipsed Hollywood.

At the University of Oklahoma, Weaver became a standout decathlete and set records. His ambition was not a screen career but a place on the United States Olympic team. World War II interrupted everything when he joined the Navy and trained as a Grumman F4F Wildcat fighter pilot, an experience that instilled the discipline he later credited for his endurance.

In 1948, Weaver finished sixth at the U. S. Olympic trials in the decathlon.

Only the top three qualified. His athletic career was over. Decades later, he described the defeat with striking calm, saying it was precisely that failure that pushed him to stay in New York and pursue acting seriously.

The decision came with no safety net. Weaver was married to Gerry Stowell, his childhood sweetheart, and the couple had a young child. He studied at the Actors Studio, landed an understudy role in “Comeback Little Sheba” and worked off-Broadway, but the money never covered the bills.

By day he sold vacuum cleaners, children’s tricycles and women’s stockings, and delivered flowers. By night he attended classes and auditions. There were moments, he later admitted, when he considered abandoning acting entirely for a stable job.

Each time, he gave himself one more chance.

Actress Shelley Winters, whom he met at the Actors Studio, repeatedly introduced him to producers. In 1952, she brought him to Universal Studios, which signed him to a contract. Small, often uncredited roles followed in westerns including “Horizons West,” “The Redhead from Wyoming” and “The Man from the Alamo.”

Then came the phone call that changed everything. Weaver was delivering flowers when he learned he had won the role of Chester Good. His weekly salary jumped from roughly $60 to $300.

For the first time, a stable life for his family seemed possible.

“Gunsmoke” premiered and made Weaver a household name. Fan mail poured into the studio. He appeared in Orson Welles’ “Touch of Evil” in 1958 and in “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” and “The Twilight Zone.”

In 1959, he won the Primetime Emmy for outstanding supporting actor in a drama series.

Yet the more famous Chester became, the more narrowly Weaver was cast. Producers saw the deputy before they saw the man. He concluded that if he waited for “Gunsmoke” to end, he might remain identified with a single character forever.

In 1964, at the height of the show’s success, Weaver walked away. It was an enormous gamble. He later said that had he stayed until the series ended, he might never have become a leading man.

The industry questioned the decision when his first starring vehicle, “Kentucky Jones,” was cancelled after one season.

Weaver refused to retreat to familiar roles. He appeared in “Duel at Diablo” alongside James Garner and Sidney Poitier, joined “Gentle Ben,” and took a steady stream of guest parts that steadily dismantled the Chester image. The rebuilding years, he said, proved his range extended far beyond westerns.

The payoff arrived in 1970. NBC offered him “McCloud” after Fess Parker declined. As Sam McCloud, a New Mexico lawman transplanted to New York City, Weaver finally stepped out of Chester’s shadow.

The cowboy-in-Manhattan contrast gave the show its own identity, and his catchphrase, “There you go,” became a national favorite.

The role earned him two Emmy nominations and vindicated his decision to leave “Gunsmoke” six years earlier. A year later, a young director named Steven Spielberg cast him in “Duel,” the story of an ordinary man pursued by an unseen truck. Weaver carried nearly the entire film alone, with minimal dialogue.

He called it his favorite role.

From 1973 to 1975, his fellow actors elected him president of the Screen Actors Guild during a turbulent period of change in performers’ rights and working conditions. He also released spoken-word albums blending poetry, storytelling and music, refusing to let a single role define his creative life.

When “McCloud” ended in 1977, Weaver faced a harder challenge: how to keep moving after two career peaks. He chose deliberately varied projects, including the landmark miniseries “Centennial” and television films such as “Amber Waves,” “Cocaine” and “Bluffing It,” playing doctors, fathers and ordinary people caught in the social issues of the day.

Later series including “Stone,” “Emerald Point N. A. S.”

and “Buck James” failed to recapture the “Gunsmoke” or “McCloud” magic. Weaver gradually accepted that not every stage of a career must be defined by a hit. What mattered, he said, was that he could still work and still try things he had never done.

Recognition continued. In 1981, he was inducted into the Hall of Great Western Performers at the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum. In 1986, he received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Neither launched another peak, but both confirmed a legacy larger than any single series.

Behind the spotlight stood Gerry, whom he married in 1945, before fame arrived. Their marriage lasted more than 60 years, until his death. They raised three sons, Richard, Robert and Rustin, largely outside the public eye.

In an industry marked by broken marriages, theirs remained remarkably quiet.

The family endured profound grief in 2003, when Lynn Anne Weaver, wife of their son Robert, was killed in the Santa Monica Farmers Market crash, a tragedy that claimed 10 lives. Weaver spoke little about it publicly, but the loss struck the family deeply in his final years.

As his filming schedule slowed, Weaver’s priorities shifted. He built an “Earthship” home in Colorado with architect Michael Reynolds, constructing walls from earth-packed used tires, aluminum cans and glass bottles, powered by solar energy and designed to minimize reliance on conventional fuels.

In 1993, he founded the Institute of Ecolonomics, promoting development that delivers economic benefit while reducing environmental harm. He had earlier created LAF, Love Is Feeding Everyone, which provided food assistance to hundreds of thousands of people across the Los Angeles area.

He supported animal welfare through the Genesis Awards and led a cross-country campaign promoting alternative-fuel vehicles. Years before climate change became a mainstream concern, Weaver was speaking openly about carbon emissions, fossil fuels and their long-term consequences, often reducing his message to three words: reduce, reuse, recycle.

He insisted that responsibility for the planet belonged not only to governments, businesses or scientists, but to every individual. His stated hope was simple and personal: that his children and grandchildren would inherit a better world. It was a mission that drew little of the attention his television roles had commanded.

In 2005, Weaver took the role of Henry Ritter on the series “Wildfire,” playing a calm, experienced grandfather guiding younger characters. It became the final long-running television role of his career. While the series was still in production, his health declined as he battled prostate cancer.

On February 24, 2006, Dennis Weaver died at his home in Ridgeway, Colorado, at 81. His death closed more than half a century of artistic achievement and drew mourning across the American television industry. Colleagues remembered not only Chester Good and Sam McCloud, but a man who never feared starting over.

What emerges now, years later, is a portrait of a performer who left the track for New York, abandoned a hit series at its peak, and spent his last decades building a house from discarded tires and arguing that fame was never the finish line. Each new direction began while the previous path was still open.

Weaver never achieved everything he hoped for. He missed the Olympics, gave up a famous role and spent years searching for equal success, and started from scratch more than once. Yet each decision reflected a willingness to accept risk in exchange for living according to what he believed mattered.

When fame arrived, he kept his life simple, his marriage intact and his attention fixed on concerns beyond entertainment. The choices were never loud or attention-seeking. They revealed the man behind the image of a television star, and they are the reason his name is still spoken long after the stage lights went dark.