RIP Peter Graves
booie
Published: March 14, 2010
Peter Graves, the cool spymaster of television’s “Mission: Impossible”
and the dignified host of the “Biography” series, who successfully
spoofed his own gravitas in the “Airplane!” movie farces, died on
Sunday. He was 83.
Mr. Graves in a Geico commercial, spoofing his own image.
He died of a heart attack at his home in Pacific Palisades, Calif.,
said Fred Barman, his business manager.
It was a testament to Mr. Graves’s earnest, unhammy ability to make
fun of himself that after decades of playing square he-men and
straitlaced authority figures, he was perhaps best known to younger
audiences for a deadpan line in “Airplane!” (“Joey, do you like movies
about gladiators?”) and one from a memorable Geico car insurance
commercial (“I was one lucky woman”).
Born Peter Aurness in Minneapolis, the blond, 6-foot-2 Mr. Graves
served in the Army Air Forces in 1944 and ’45, studied drama at the
University of Minnesota under the G.I. Bill of Rights and played the
clarinet in local bands before following his older brother, James
Arness, to Hollywood.
His first credited film appearance was in “Rogue River” (1950), with
Rory Calhoun. Mr. Graves’s getting a Hollywood contract for the
picture persuaded his fiancée’s family to let her marry him. He
changed his name for that movie to Graves, his maternal grandfather’s
name, to avoid confusion with his older brother.
He soon found himself in classics like Billy Wilder’s “Stalag
17” (1953), where he played a security officer with a secret; Charles
Laughton’s “Night of the Hunter” (1955); Otto Preminger’s “Court-
Martial of Billy Mitchell” (1955); and John Ford’s “Long Gray
Line” (1955).
Mr. Graves became known for taking all his roles seriously, injecting
a certain believability into even the campiest plot. He appeared in
westerns like “The Yellow Tomahawk” (1954) and “Wichita” (1955); a
Civil War adventure, “The Raid” (1954); and gangster movies (“Black
Tuesday,” 1954, and “The Naked Street,” 1955). He played earnest
scientists in science fiction/horror films: “Killers From
Space” (1954), “It Conquered the World” (1956) and “Beginning of the
End” (1957, about giant grasshoppers in Chicago). There was also cold
war science fiction anti-Communism: “Red Planet Mars” (1952).
Other movies included “East of Sumatra” (1953), “Beneath the 12-Mile
Reef” (1953), “A Rage to Live” (1965), “Texas Across the
River” (1966), “Sergeant Ryker” (1968), “The Ballad of Josie” (1968),
“The Five-Man Army” (1969), “The Clonus Horror” (1979), “The Guns and
the Fury” (1981), “Savannah Smiles” (1982), “Number One With a
Bullet” (1986), “Addams Family Values” (1993), “The House on Haunted
Hill” (1999) and “Men in Black II” (2002).
In 1955 Mr. Graves began his career as a television series regular as
the star of “Fury,” a western family adventure series about a rancher
named Jim Newton, his orphaned ward and the boy’s black stallion. It
ran until 1959 on NBC, helped pioneer television adventure series and
solidified Mr. Graves’s TV credentials.
Some of his hundreds of television credits include “Alfred Hitchcock
Presents,” “Whiplash” (1961), “The Dean Martin Show” (1970), the
Herman Wouk mini-series “The Winds of War” (1983) and “War and
Remembrance” (1988), “Fantasy Island” (1978-83) and “7th
Heaven” (1999-2005). He served as the host or narrator for numerous
television specials and performed in television movies of the week
like “The President’s Plane Is Missing” (1973), “Where Have All the
People Gone” (1974) and “Death Car on the Freeway” (1979).
Mr. Graves played his most famous television character from 1967 to
1973 in “Mission: Impossible,” reprising it from 1988 to 1990. He was
Jim Phelps, the leader of the Impossible Missions Force, a super-
secret government organization that conducted dangerous undercover
assignments (which he always chose to accept). After the tape
summarizing the objective self-destructed, the team would use not
violence, but elaborate con games to trap the villains. In his role,
Mr. Graves was a model of cool, deadpan efficiency.
But he was appalled when his agent sent him the script for the role of
a pedophile pilot in “Airplane!” (1980). “I tore my hair and ranted
and raved and said, ‘This is insane,’ he recalled on “Biography” in
1997. Some of the role’s lines (“Have you ever been in a Turkish
prison?”) looked at first as if they could get him thrown in jail,
never mind ruining his career. He told his agent to tell David and
Jerry Zucker and Jim Abrahams, the director-producers, to find
themselves a comedian. He relented when the Zucker brothers explained
that the secret of their spoof would be the deadpan behavior of the
cast; they didn’t want a comedian, they wanted the Peter Graves of
“Fury” and “Mission: Impossible.”
Mr. Graves used his familiar earnest, all-American demeanor in service
of some of the comic movie’s most outrageous moments. He reprised the
role of Captain Oveur in “Airplane II” in 1982.
Starting in the mid-1980s Mr. Graves was the host of a number of
television science specials on “Discover.” In 1987, he became the host
of the Arts and Entertainment Network’s long-running “Biography”
series, narrating the lives of figures like Prince Andrew, Muhammad
Ali, pioneers of the space program, Churchill, Ernie Kovacs, Edward G.
Robinson, Sophia Loren, Jackie Robinson, Howard Hughes, Steven
Spielberg and Jonathan Winters.
In 1997, Mr. Graves was the subject of his own “Biography”
presentation, “Peter Graves: Mission Accomplished.” In 2002, Mr.
Graves was interviewed for a special about the documentary series,
“Biography: 15 Years and Counting.”
Mr. Graves won a Golden Globe Award in 1971 for his performance in
“Mission: Impossible” and in 1997, he and “Biography” won an Emmy
Award for outstanding informational series.
In 1998, he joined his wife, Joan, in an effort to get Los Angeles to
ban gasoline-powered leaf blowers from residential areas, testifying
before the City Council, “’We’re all victims of these machines.”
He is survived by his wife, Joan Graves, and three daughters, Amanda
Lee Graves, Claudia King Graves and Kelly Jean Graves.
booie writes:
I just saw him on the Geico commercial yesterday.
I thought he looked very thin in the face,
fare thee well Peter
Andrew
> Peter Graves, ‘Mission: Impossible’ Star, Dies at 83 Sign In to E-Mail
Wow. He died and then signed into his email? That is news!