The film career was a working-actor career rather than a star trajectory of the highest order. He was well-known, consistently employed for a period, and then less so as the market for the specific kind of Western films he was associated with contracted in the 1960s. By the late 1960s the film work had largely ended.
## The Post-War Struggles
Murphy’s post-war mental health difficulties were real, documented through multiple first-person accounts and accounts from people around him, and are part of the public record he himself contributed to through his advocacy.
He had what his generation called “battle fatigue.” He experienced insomnia, depression, and recurring nightmares. He slept with a loaded pistol under his pillow. His first wife, actress Wanda Hendrix, whom he married in 1949 and divorced in 1951, described alarming behavior including an incident in which he had held her at gunpoint. Friends described outbursts that fit the pattern that would later be formally understood as post-traumatic stress disorder.
By the mid-1960s, he had become dependent on a prescription sleeping medication called Placidyl. When he recognized the dependency, he checked himself into a motel room and stayed there for a week, stopping the medication and enduring withdrawal without medical supervision, in isolation. He came out the other side of it. By his own account and the accounts of people around him, he managed the dependency through this method.
What he did with these experiences is as significant as the experiences themselves. He spoke publicly about combat trauma at a time when the American military culture strongly discouraged any such discussion. The expectation was that soldiers would absorb what they had seen and done and return to civilian life without audible distress. Murphy rejected this expectation and said publicly what many veterans were experiencing privately.