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Michael Landon (October 31, 1936 – July 1,
1991), born Eugene Maurice Orowitz, was an American actor and director.
Landon's father was Jewish, his mother was not. Landon considered
himself Jewish.
Landon was best known for his starring
roles in three TV series spanning three decades. In the 1960s he starred
as "Little Joe" on Bonanza. In the 1970s and into the 1980s he starred
as Charles Ingalls in Little House On The Prairie and starred in Highway
to Heaven as an angel, also in the 1980s. Landon also directed the last
two series.
In high school, Landon excelled at track,
especially with the javelin. He earned a scholarship to USC, but could
no longer attend after tearing a ligament in his arm. At this point he
started taking small roles and bit parts, but decided his birth name was
not appropriate for an aspiring actor and changed his name to Michael
Landon. He decided on the name by picking it out of a Los Angeles phone
book.
Landon was discovered by producer Herman
Cohen, who cast the young man in his first big role as teenager Tony
Rivers in I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957). He also gained exposure as
Tom Dooley in the western The Legend of Tom Dooley (1959).
That same year he started starring in the
then-new TV series Bonanza as "Little Joe." The youngest brother in the
Cartwright family and always a ladies man, he quickly became one of the
show's most beloved characters. Late in the series, Landon asked for
permission to direct a few episodes of the series, which was granted.
The show ran for 14 years, from 1959 to 1973, and spanned 461 episodes.
Soon after the cancellation of Bonanza,
Landon started a new project in 1974, a television film called Little
House on the Prairie based on the popular book by Laura Ingalls Wilder.
Little House would later develop into a television series. He not only
starred in the show as the patriarch Charles Ingalls, but served as the
producer, writer, director and executive producer. He served mostly in
these capacities for the series' eight years, which ended in 1982.
In 1984 he began his role in Highway to
Heaven as Jonathan Smith, an angel who tried to save people by helping
them turn their lives around. When his friend and co-star, Victor
French, died of lung cancer in 1989, Landon cancelled the series.
Landon had produced all three of his series
for NBC, but after ending Highway he was let go. He then went to CBS and
in 1991 starred in a two hour pilot called Us. This was meant to be
another winning series for Landon, but he was soon diagnosed with
pancreatic cancer that had spread to the liver. His last public
appearance was on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson in June. A few
weeks later, Landon passed away in Malibu, California with his family,
children and colleagues by his side. He was interred in the Hillside
Memorial Park Cemetery in Culver City, California.
Landon was married three times. His first
wife was Dodie Frasier, a legal secretary who was six years his senior.
He adopted her son, Mark, and together they adopted another boy. A few
years later in 1962, he divorced Dodie to marry (Marjorie) Lynn Noe, a
model, who had a young daughter from a previous marriage. By all
accounts, Landon treated her like his own child and had four more
children with Lynn. This marriage was believed to be very happy and
different from typical "Hollywood marriages", so the tabloids jumped at
the affair Landon started with another woman. Cindy Clerico was a
make-up artist and stand-in for one of the stars; they met on the set of
Little House. Clerico was 21 years his junior. They married in 1983 and
had Jennifer (born in 1983) and Sean (born in 1986).
His co-star on Little House, Melissa
Gilbert, named her son, Michael Garrett Boxleitner (1995), after Landon.
For his contribution to the television
industry, Michael Landon has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at
1500 N. Vine Street. In 1998, he was inducted posthumously into the
Western Performers Hall of Fame at the National Cowboy & Western
Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.
The late actor's daughter Jennifer, has
starred as Gwen Norbeck on the soap opera As the World Turns since 2005.
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URL of Original Article:
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Date Article Copied:
Aug. 26, 2005
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