Global Courant 2023-05-29 21:25:37
George Maharis, a stage-trained actor with a rugged appearance, who became an icon for American youth in the 1960s when he toured the country in a Corvette convertible on the hit television series ‘Route 66’, has passed away.
Maharis’ friend and caretaker Marc Bahan said in a Facebook post that he passed away on Wednesday. Bahan told the Hollywood Reporter, which first reported Maharis’ death, that he died at his home in Beverly Hills, California, after contracting hepatitis. He turned 94.
On “Route 66,” Maharis played Buz Murdock, a hardened survivor of New York City’s Hell’s Kitchen. His co-star Martin Milner, who died in 2015, was Tod Stiles, a young man raised wealthy who was left with nothing but a shiny new Corvette after his father’s death.
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The pair decided to travel the highway that author John Steinbeck had dubbed “The Mother Road.” Each week brought a new adventure in a new city, and audiences tuned in en masse.
“Route 66” was the rare series at the time that was filmed on location and moved to new towns and cities for each new episode. It starred future stars as guest stars, including Robert Redford, James Caan, Robert Duvall and Alan Alda in some of their earliest roles.
The legendary highway itself was as much a star of the show as Maharis and Milner. Bypassed in favor of larger, faster interstates, it stretched unbroken from Chicago to the Pacific Ocean and has come to be revered as a driving force behind the country’s westward migration in the 20th century.
“Route 66” is said to have been inspired by Jack Kerouac’s novel “On the Road,” and it spawned its own hit, an instrumental composed by Nelson Riddle. The more famous tune “(Get Your Kicks On) Route 66” was not connected to the series.
George Maharis, a prominent actor best known for starring in ‘Route 66’, an early 1960s Jack Kerouac-inspired crime drama, has passed away. He turned 94. (Photo by Art Zelin/Getty Images)
Maharis left the show after the third season – it would go on one more time without him – never achieving the same fame again.
He got a name check that introduced him to subsequent generations in 2019 director Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,” when fictional actor Rick Dalton, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, said he was being considered for the role of Steve McQueen in “The Great Escape”. along with three Georges: “Peppard, Maharis and Chakiris.”
Born in New York, one of seven children of Greek immigrants, Maharis really grew up in Hell’s Kitchen. His parents ran a successful restaurant and they wanted George to join the family business.
“Growing up in Hell’s Kitchen, at least for me, was all about ‘I’m not staying here,'” he said in a 2007 interview. “Life is about the journey, the going. I had to get out.”
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He hoped to become a singer, but damaged his vocal cords, so he switched to acting. After training with Lee Strasberg and Sanford Meisner at the Actors Studio, he began appearing in off-Broadway plays.
Outstanding announcements for his work in Edward Albee’s play “Zoo Story” and in appearances in the television drama “Naked City” attracted attention. After a small role in the 1960 movie “Exodus” and a few other roles, he landed on “Route 66”.
After leaving the series, Maharis was cast as a star in such films as ‘Quick Before It Melts’, ‘The Satan Bug’, ‘Sylvia’. “A covenant with death.” “The event.” “The Desperados” and “Land Raiders.”
In 1970, he returned to weekly television playing a criminologist in “The Most Deadly Game”, but the show only lasted one season.
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Maharis continued to act in the following decades, appearing in TV movies such as ‘Escape to Mindanao’ and ‘Murder on Flight 502’, ‘Disaster in the Sky’, ‘Crash of Flight 401’, ‘Death in Space’ and in TV series. including ‘Fantasy Island’, ‘The Bionic Woman’ and ‘Murder, She Wrote’.
