Robert Horton, the actor, who has died aged 91, won legions of female fans in the role of frontier scout Flint McCullough on Wagon Train (1957-65), a television western series that became a massive hit on both sides of the Atlantic.

Each season of the show, which took its inspiration from the 1950 John Ford film The Wagon Master, featured a wagon train wending its way from Missouri to Sacramento in the 1860s, dealing with indians, poisonous snakes, tornadoes and outlaws along the way. Thanks to Flint McCullough and his wagon master Major Seth Adams (Ward Bond, later John McIntyre), viewers always knew it would reach its destination.

Ruggedly handsome, with auburn hair and an easy smile, Horton, who did all his own riding and stunt work, helped to turn the NBC (later ABC) series, into one of the most successful western series ever made.

The role turned him into an international idol and he was especially popular in Britain, where Wagon Train was shown on ITV’s Monday teatime slot. When he appeared at the London Palladium, a reviewer reported that he had drawn “squeals and shrieks’’ from his mainly female audience.

Afterwards he had to lock himself into his hotel room to escape their clutches. It was claimed that the Labour leader Harold Wilson wanted the 1959 General Election held on a day when the show was not screened, in case it kept voters at home.

In 1962, however, Horton began to tire of his role and left the series, claiming he was “fed up” with westerns and wanted to expand his repertoire. “There is a lot more to this business than just collecting your pay cheque,” he told an interviewer. But the offers failed to materialise and by 1965 he was back in the saddle, in A Man Called Shenandoah, as a Civil War veteran who has lost his memory and wanders the west trying to find out who he was.

The series lasted barely a season, one reviewer observing that it was just as well that Horton was amnesic, so he could not remember how bad the previous week’s episode had been. After that he more or less vanished from view.

Meade Howard Horton was born into a Mormon family in Los Angeles on July 29 1924. Educated at a military school in North Hollywood, he enlisted in the Coast Guard, from which he was soon discharged due to an enlarged kidney.

In 1945 a chance encounter with a talent scout led to an uncredited part in the Second World War film A Walk in the Sun. After taking a degree in Theatre Arts at the University of California, Los Angeles, he appeared in (among others) Apache War Smoke (1952) and on television shows such as The Lone Ranger and The Public Defender before winning his part on Wagon Train.

After leaving the series, Horton did a Broadway musical, 110 in the Shade for a season – to lukewarm reviews. After A Man Called Shenandoah he toured in stage musicals for several years, did a forgettable Japanese science-fi movie, The Green Slime (1968, in which he played an astronaut who returns to Earth with green gunk that turns into monsters that feed off electricity). In the 1980s he turned to daytime television, playing Whit McColl in As the World Turns (1982-84) and taking small parts in such series as Alfred Hitchcock Presents and Murder She Wrote. He also performed as a singer in theatres and nightclubs, sometimes with his wife Marilynn.

With his earnings from Wagon Train, Horton made a series of shrewd investments and admitted to being well off financially. He was a keen collector of vintage cars.

His wife survives him.

Robert Horton, born July 29 1924, died March 9 2016