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BARRY MORSE (ap/file 1964) |
LOS ANGELES - Barry Morse - an actor best known for portraying Lieutenant Philip Gerard, who relentlessly pursued Dr. Richard Kimble (played by David Janssen) on the hit 1960s television series "The Fugitive" - died Saturday at University College Hospital in London. He was 89.
In the 1963 series debut of "The Fugitive," Kimble is falsely accused of murdering his wife and escapes from Gerard. Kimble spends the next four years eluding the detective and hunting the one-armed man he believed was the real killer.
The finale, broadcast Aug. 29, 1967, made television history. The ABC show was seen by more than 72 percent of viewers, a record that stood until "Dallas" eclipsed it 13 years later. In the climactic scene, Gerard shoots the one-armed man to save Kimble's life.
Some viewers were so wrapped up in the morality play that they had trouble distinguishing Mr. Morse the actor from his cop-as-villain character.
"Elderly ladies bashed me across the head with their handbags, or some hulking great man would come up to me in a bar and say: 'Don't you understand? The guy's innocent!' It was an enormous compliment - and quite dangerous," Morse told the London Daily Mail in 1993.
He considered the part groundbreaking because the character was "carefully designed to be disliked."
"I was the most hated man in America, and I loved it," he said.
The widely syndicated show failed to provide him "one thin dime" in recent years, Mr. Morse often said, since residuals from the series ran out after five years.
A London native, Mr. Morse grew up poor and left school at 14.
While working as a messenger, he happened upon a public performance by students of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. The discovery led him to attend the school and he was soon acting in the city's West End theaters and appearing in British Broadcasting Corp. productions.
After moving to Canada from England in 1951, he was such a force on Canadian Broadcasting Corp. shows that one critic referred to him as "test pattern," saying that the network put him on when they had nothing else to air.
In the early 1950s, Mr. Morse created a radio program about the history of acting called "A Touch of Greasepaint" that aired for a decade. The show was the genesis of his one-man play "Merely Players," which he performed to help establish a show-business retirement home in Toronto in 1993.
Over seven decades, he inhabited more than 3,000 roles on stage and in radio, television, and film, according to his website.
His work included TV miniseries such as "The Martian Chronicles" and "The Winds of War."
A role on the police drama "The Untouchables" led to his being cast in "The Fugitive." Since he did not appear in every episode, Mr. Morse regularly traveled to Canada in 1966 to serve as artistic director of the Shaw Festival, established in Niagara-on-the-Lake to honor George Bernard Shaw, a playwright Mr. Morse regarded as "a great hero."
His wife of 60 years, actress Sydney Sturgess, died in 1999.
© Copyright 2008 Globe Newspaper Company.
