He made 55 movies, married five times, earned $18 million, invested wisely and more or less retired at the age of 46 to play golf and eat

Bare chested and bare armed, Mr. Mature had a long career in Hollywood sporting loincloths, togas and leotards as the prehistoric hunter, Tumak, in the movie that made him a star in 1940, ”One Million B.C.”; as the Greek slave Demetrius, who became a fervent Christian in ”The Robe” (1953) and who later demonstrated muscular Christianity in ”Demetrius and the Gladiators” (1954); as the dashing lion-killer in ”The Egyptian” (1954), and as the long-haired Samson who succumbed to the wiles of Hedy Lamarr in Cecil B. DeMille’s ”Samson and Delilah” (1949).

The word ”beefcake” may have been coined to define Mr. Mature’s broad shoulders, narrow waist, curly hair and sensual face crowned by dazzling white teeth. In his first Broadway role he played the gorgeous movie star who wooed Gertrude Lawrence in the hit Broadway musical ”Lady in the Dark” (1941). His costumes included pink circus tights topped by leopard-skin briefs, and he managed not to be an anticlimax even after being described as ”the most beautiful hunk of man you ever saw in your life” before his arrival onstage.

Never an actor who took himself too seriously, Mr. Mature was fond of telling how he was rejected for membership in the Los Angeles Country Club because the club did not accept actors. He said that he had replied, ”Hell, I’m no actor, and I’ve got 28 pictures and a scrapbook of reviews to prove it.”

Actually, some of his reviews were good. Under the direction of John Ford, he held his own against Henry Fonda’s Wyatt Earp, playing the dying Doc Holliday, the Eastern doctor turned Western gambler in ”My Darling Clementine” (1946). And in the film noir ”Kiss of Death” (1947) he was praised for his work as Nick Bianco, a crook who wants to go straight but who is menaced by Richard Widmark’s giggling psychopathic killer, Tommy Udo. It was perhaps his best performance. ”Victor Mature gives an unexpectedly subdued, convincing performance,” Pauline Kael wrote.

Victor Mature was set on his career path as a heartthrob in his first film, ”The Housekeeper’s Daughter” (1939). He flashed on the screen for less than five minutes playing the bit part of a lovesick gangster; his appearance brought 20,000 fan letters and won him the lead in ”One Million B.C.”

Mr. Mature told Life magazine in 1941, ”I can act, but what I’ve got that the others don’t have is this,” as he pointed to his body. The same article described him as ”proportioned like a frappe glass” with a 33-inch waist, 25-inch biceps, a 45-inch chest and standing 6 feet 2 1/2 inches tall. Life added that 300 New York models had chosen him as the man they would most like to be marooned with on a desert island.

Mr. Mature, who was fond of ice cream and loathed exercise, described himself to The Saturday Evening Post in 1942 as ”the biggest fraud that ever hit Hollywood.”

But he took full advantage of his physique. He made 55 movies, married five times, earned $18 million, invested wisely and more or less retired at the age of 46 to play golf and eat. ”There’s a lot to be said for loafing if you know how to do it gracefully,” he said in 1986.

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From 1940 to 1950, despite losing three years when he was in the Coast Guard during World War II, Mr. Mature starred in 17 movies, including, in 1942, ”Footlight Serenade” and ”Song of the Islands” with Betty Grable, ”My Gal Sal” with Rita Hayworth and ”Seven Days Leave” with Lucille Ball. From 1950 to 1960 he churned out 30 films. Then, having prospered in commercial real estate and having been prescient enough to open stores selling television sets the year after television began, he departed to a manor house overlooking the ninth hole at the Rancho Santa Fe Country Club , a two-hour drive south of Hollywood.

Victor Mature was born on Jan. 29, 1913, in Louisville, Ky., the son of an Austrian scissors grinder who had married the local doctor’s daughter. Victor was the only one of the three children of Marcellus and Clara Mature to survive.

Unstudious and rebellious, he was thrown out of four schools, including the Kentucky Military Institute. A classmate there, the comedian Jim Backus, recalled that they were the hosts of illegal cocktail parties of lemon soda and Aqua Velva shaving lotion, and said that Mr. Mature was known as Cadet Slob.

Leaving school at 15, he became a salesman with a wholesale candy house, then went out on his own as a candy jobber. Four years later he packed his car with canned goods and candy and headed to Hollywood, armed with the following advice from his father, who had become a success in the refrigeration business: ”As long as people think you’re dumber than you are, you’ll make money.”

Mr. Mature said he telegraphed his father: ”Arrived here with 11 cents and an ambition. I am going to become an actor.”

His father wired back: ”Forty-three years ago I arrived in New York with five cents and could not even speak English. You are six cents up on me.”

Because Mr. Mature delighted in embroidering his life to intrigue reporters, that story may have been apocryphal. But he did sleep for several months in a tent in the backyard of Gilmore Brown, the director of the Pasadena Playhouse. Told to study acting at the Playhouse’s drama school, he polished cars, walked dogs and waxed floors to earn his tuition. He made his debut as an actor in ”Paths of Glory” in 1936 and followed up with small roles in about 60 Playhouse productions before earning a leading role in ”Autumn Crocus.” Along the way he married and divorced Frances Evans, a member of the acting company.

In the spring of 1939, the producer Hal Roach saw Mr. Mature as the lead in the Pasadena Playhouse production of Ben Hecht’s ”To Quito and Back” and signed him to play Lefty in ”The Housekeeper’s Daughter.”

After RKO bought half of his contract and cast him opposite Anna Neagle in ”No, No, Nanette” (1940), he was off to New York.

When ”Lady in the Dark” closed in June 1941, he married Martha Stephenson Kemp, the widow of the band leader Hal Kemp. They separated six months later.

He was now a star, earning $1,200 a week at 20th Century Fox, which had bought his contract from Roach. After starring with Betty Grable in the murder-mystery ”I Wake Up Screaming,” he wore a burnoose as the languid Dr. Omar in ”The Shanghai Gesture,” which was directed by Josef von Sternberg. Then he enlisted in the Coast Guard and spent 14 months during World War II as a chief boatswain’s mate on convoy duty in the North Atlantic.

While making ”My Gal Sal,” he fell in love with Ms. Hayworth and planned to marry her after the war. When his ship docked, he heard on the radio that she had married her magic-show partner, Orson Welles. He responded, ”Apparently the way to a woman’s heart is to saw her in half.”

With his voluptuous face and hooded, heavy-lidded eyes, he had an overripe quality on screen that the critic David Thomson called ”a barely concealed sexual advertisement.” Few of his movies were memorable. In endless early films, he played the wise guy — the slightly crooked promoter with too much brilliantine on his impossibly thick black hair.

He was back in ancient Rome appearing opposite Jean Simmons in ”Androcles and the Lion” (1952), then he played an aging football star in Jacques Tourneur’s ”Easy Living” (1949); a foreign-born racketeer in ”Gambling House” (1950); the American promoter who discovered Australian swimming star Esther Williams in ”Million Dollar Mermaid” (1952) and the Sioux warrior in ”Chief Crazy Horse” (1955). As the years passed he appeared in movies with names like ”The Sharkfighters” and ”Timbuktu,” playing an assortment of intrepid adventurers, soldiers and heroic natives in various countries and historical eras, including in the film ”Hannibal” (1960), in which he crossed the Alps with elephants.

”I wasn’t pampered the way a Tyrone Power was,” Mr. Mature said of his 18 years under contract to Fox. ”Zanuck would say to producers, ‘If you’re not careful, I’ll give you Mature for your next picture.’ ”

He married for a third time in 1948 and was divorced in 1955. His fourth marriage, in 1959, to Adrienne Joy Urwick, also ended in divorce. In 1972, he married for the fifth and last time. ”This one has lasted longer than all the others put together,” he quipped in 1988 of his marriage to Lorey Sabena, a former opera singer. He has one daughter, Victoria. The Matures later divorced.

Mr. Mature had always been quick-witted with an excellent sense of timing, and he did not overstay his welcome in Hollywood. For most of his career he had earned $5,000 a week and had still been frugal enough to take half a dozen pairs of high-button shoes from ”Million Dollar Mermaid” to convert into golf shoes. After ”The Tartars” (1962), an Italian spectacle graced by Welles as the leader of the barbarians, he turned his attention to playing 18 holes of golf six days a week.

During the next two de cades he occasionally turned his back on golf for a spot of acting. In 1966 he went to Italy to do a wicked parody of himself and earn the movie’s loudest laughs as a matinee idol in Vittorio De Sica’s satirical farce, ”After the Fox.”

Victor Mature was never adverse to kidding himself. In the 1968 movie ”Head” he was the giant head, with the Monkees pop group appearing as dandruff in his hair. He got some of the best reviews of his career as the amiably vulgar Mafia big shot Carmine Ganucci in another farce ”Every Little Crook and Nanny,” in 1972. His last performance was as Samson’s father in a 1980’s television remake of ”Samson and Delilah.’

PROC. BY MOVIES