LOS ANGELES — Pernell Roberts, the ruggedly handsome actor who shocked Hollywood by leaving TV’s “Bonanza” at the height of its popularity, then found fame again years later on “Trapper John, M.D.,” has died. He was 81.
Roberts, the last surviving cast member from the classic Western, died of cancer Sunday at his Malibu home, his wife, Eleanor Criswell, told the Los Angeles Times.
Although he rocketed to fame in 1959 as Adam Cartwright, eldest son of a Nevada ranching family led by Lorne Greene’s patriarchal Ben Cartwright, Roberts chafed at the limitations he felt his “Bonanza” character was given.
“They told me the four characters (Greene, himself and Dan Blocker and Michael Landon as his brothers) would be carefully defined and the scripts carefully prepared,” he complained to The Associated Press in 1964. “None of it ever happened.”
It particularly distressed him that his character, a man in his 30s, had to continually defer to the wishes of his widowed father.
When Roberts left the show, the general feeling in Hollywood was that he had foolishly doomed his career and turned his back on a fortune in “Bonanza” earnings.
Indeed, for the next 14 years he mainly made appearances on TV shows and in miniseries, or toured with such theatrical productions as “The King and I, “Camelot” and “The Music Man.” Then, in 1979, he landed another series, “Trapper John, M.D.,” in which he played the title role: a balding, middle-aged chief of surgery at San Francisco Memorial Hospital.
The series, praised for its serious treatment of the surgical world, aired until 1986.
Pernell Roberts Jr. was born in 1928 in Waycross, Ga. As a young man, he once commented, “I distinguished myself by flunking out of college three times.”
After pursuing occupations that ranged from tombstone maker to railroad riveter, he decided to become an actor.
Three of Roberts’ marriages ended in divorce. His first, to Vera Mowry, produced a son, Jonathan, who died in 1989 at age 37.
