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New York and Los Angeles are convenient home bases for actors seeking work, but hardly the perfect fit for a West Texas fellow with a fondness for horses, cowboy hats, and cold beers shared with plainspoken, friendly folks.

Actor Barry Corbin spent years in both of those imposing cities during his well-traveled life. In 1990, however, he got a call that brought him to North Texas, where he’s put down some of the deepest roots he’s ever planted.

The call came from a grown daughter he’d never known he had. He met her, got to know her and her children, and eventually bought all of them a 14-acre property near I-30 and Eastchase Parkway. Fort Worth has been home ever since — the longest he’s ever lived in one house. With his 70th birthday approaching, he’s content to grow old here — especially since, with a major international airport nearby, he can still jet away to movie sets in far corners of the world, when work calls.

But time keeps changing, and Corbin, who has always rolled with the punches of his uncertain profession, is weaving and bobbing again. The actor known for his roles in Lonesome Dove, Northern Exposure, Dallas, WarGames, and, more recently, No Country For Old Men, has found there aren’t as many calls as there used to be for his considerable skills, meaty face, and Texas drawl. Money’s tight, his grandkids are grown, and he can no longer afford an 8,000-square-foot house and acreage. It’s been on the market for a while with no takers.

This year, with debts mounting, he declared bankruptcy, mostly to buy time while he tries to recoup his investment on the land. And he and his daughter and grandkids are in the process of moving into much more modest digs, a row of three small homes his daughter owns in Handley. It will be another family compound, with room for a couple of horses — but no swimming pool, no guest house, no private screening rooms.

Corbin’s not worried though. He’s lived an actor’s vagabond and topsy-turvy existence ever since he put Lubbock in his rearview mirror as a young man and headed to New York to become a stage actor. He’s been in hit movies; he’s acted in stinkers. He’s been flush; he’s been broke. He doesn’t expect or even seek firm footing. He rides waves. Ride one a while, he said, and jump to the next. His cowboy philosophy doesn’t lend itself to huge emotional highs or devastating lows. Problems work themselves out. Or they don’t.

“I never did care anything about money,” he said. “I told my kids, money is the least important thing in the world unless you don’t have enough or you have too much. If you get too much, you start worrying about it. If you don’t have enough, it’s hard to keep the basic necessities. In the middle, money’s not important. That’s the way I’ve always felt, which is probably why I’m in the shape I am today. But I don’t regret it.”

Born in Lamesa near Lubbock, Corbin loved horses and the rural life like many kids his age. He was fascinated with Hollywood cowboys at Saturday movie matinees, but equally struck by the works of Shakespeare. By first grade, he’d already decided his life’s path: He would be an actor.

West Texas in the 1940s was isolated. Corbin spent summers on his grandfather’s farm and developed a love of horses. At the same time, he lost himself in books. His mother was a schoolteacher; his father’s career included being a lawyer, state senator, judge, and school principal with an appreciation of Shakespeare.

“I read the plays, and the language was fascinating to me,” Corbin said. “Same with the King James Bible. I’m not a religious person, but it’s a great collection of literature. I’ve always had an affinity for those things. I can’t explain it.”

Reading didn’t make him a sterling student. Corbin disliked regimentation and eschewed studies that held no interest for him. When a person plans his career by age 7, his focus of study narrows. Corbin didn’t care about math or science but would spend hours poring over the works of Constantin Stanislavski and Anton Chekhov to absorb theories on acting and playwriting.

As a kid he wrote and produced no-budget neighborhood plays. In high school, he joined a theater group — and the Future Farmers of America. In his spare time, he hung around older kids in the theater department at Texas Tech University and watched rehearsals for fun.

“I was an odd kid,” he said. “I’m an odd old man.”

In the decades since then, he’s figured out that those quirks made him fit right in with his profession.

“All the good actors I know don’t have a choice,” he said. “They have a calling. That’s how it was with me. My mother discouraged me. My father discouraged me. My college professor said, ‘You’ve got to have something to fall back on.’ I said, ‘If I have something to fall back on, then I’ll fall back. If I don’t have anything, then I’ve got to do it.’ ”

After high school he dabbled in higher education at Texas Tech but wasn’t interested in much beyond acting, horses, girls, and cold beverages. At Tech he sometimes napped in a particularly fetching spot. A dumpster behind a greenhouse was often stuffed with discarded flowers, making a soft, aromatic mattress for catnaps — at least until a garbage truck came by and emptied the load with Corbin inside. The incident secured his campus reputation as an entertaining sort.

For spending money, Corbin chopped cotton and roughnecked on oil rigs during school breaks. A Lubbock oilman imported a ballet master from Lithuania because he had a daughter who wanted to learn ballet. Corbin joined the class, learned to pirouette, and eventually played the Prince in Swan Lake — probably the only male teenager in Lubbock at the time willing to don tights for a ballet recital.