Patrick McGoohan, 80, the Emmy-winning actor who created and starred in the cult classic television show “The Prisoner,” died Tuesday in Los Angeles after a short illness, his son-in-law, film producer Cleve Landsberg, said.
McGoohan won two Emmys for his work on the Peter Falk detective drama “Columbo” and more recently appeared as King Edward Longshanks in the 1995 Mel Gibson film “Braveheart.”
But he was most famous as Number Six in “The Prisoner,” a sci-fi-tinged 1960s British series in which a former spy is held captive in a small enclave known only as The Village, where a nemesis named Number Two and a mysterious, unseen Number One constantly thwart his escape.
McGoohan came up with the concept and wrote and directed several episodes of the show, which has kept a devoted following in the U.S. and Europe for four decades.
He voiced his Number Six character in an episode of “The Simpsons” in 2000.
Born in New York on March 19, 1928, McGoohan was raised in England and Ireland, where his family moved shortly after his birth. He had a busy stage career before moving to television. He married stage actress Joan Drummond in 1951. The oldest of their three daughters, Catherine, is also an actress.
Other Deaths
W.D. Snodgrass, 83, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet who had a nearly 40-year teaching career, died Tuesday in Syracuse, N.Y., of lung cancer.
Snodgrass won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1960 for his first book, “Heart’s Needle,” which grew from the heartbreak of losing custody of his daughter in a bitter divorce.
Although widely credited as a founding member of the “confessional” school of poetry, Snodgrass himself dismissed the label.
He wrote more than 30 books of poetry and translations.
Sarah Booth Conroy, 81, who chronicled the homes, history and changing personalities of the Washington elite as a Washington Post reporter, editor and columnist for more than three decades, died Monday at a nursing facility in Potomac, Md. She had Alzheimer’s disease.
Conroy, who wrote more than 2,800 articles for the Post, was known for her adept reporting on the city’s diplomatic circuit and for her long- running “Chronicles” column about the city’s history.
Pedro “Cuban Pete” Aguilar, 81, one of the leading mambo dancers of the 1950s, died Tuesday in Miami, said Barbara Craddock, his longtime dance partner.
Craddock described his cause of death as heart failure but said it could be related to Aguilar’s diabetes.
Aguilar was born in Puerto Rico in 1927 and grew up in New York City, where he picked up the nickname “Cuban Pete” in 1949 at the Palladium Ballroom. The nickname referenced a Desi Arnaz song.
