“JR” kicks the bucket

[Kiwithrottlejockey]

JR Ewing actor dies at 81

REUTERS | 6:45PM - Saturday, 24 November 2012



LARRY HAGMAN who created one of American television's most supreme villains in the conniving, amoral oilman JR Ewing of Dallas, has died. He was 81.

Hagman died at a Dallas hospital of complications from his battle with throat cancer, the Dallas Morning News reported, quoting a statement from his family. He had suffered from liver cancer and cirrhosis of the liver in the 1990s after decades of drinking.

Hagman's mother was stage and movie star Mary Martin and he became a star himself in 1965 on I Dream of Jeannie, a popular television sitcom in which he played Major Anthony Nelson, an astronaut who discovers a beautiful genie in a bottle.

Dallas, which made its premiere on the CBS network in 1978, made Hagman a superstar. The show quickly became one of the network's top-rated programmes, built an international following and inspired a spin-off, imitators and a revival in 2012.

Dallas was the night-time soap-opera story of a Texas family, fabulously wealthy from oil and cattle, and its plot brimmed with back-stabbing, double-dealing, family feuds, violence, adultery and other bad behaviour.

In the middle of it all stood Hagman's black-hearted JR Ewing — grinning wickedly in a broad cowboy hat and boots, plotting how to cheat his business competitors and cheat on his wife. He was the villain TV viewers loved to despise during the show's 356-episode run from 1978 to 1991.

"I really can't remember half of the people I've slept with, stabbed in the back or driven to suicide," Hagman said of his character in Time magazine.

In his autobiography, Hello Darlin': Tall (and Absolutely True) Tales About My Life, Hagman wrote that JR originally was not to be the focus of Dallas but that changed when he began ad-libbing on the set to make his character more outrageous and compelling.

‘WHO SHOT JR?’

To conclude its second season, the Dallas producers put together one of US television's most memorable episodes in which Ewing was shot by an unseen assailant. That gave fans months to fret over whether JR would survive and who had pulled the trigger. In the show's opening the following season, it was revealed that JR's sister-in-law, Kristin, with whom he had been having an affair, was behind the gun.

Hagman said an international publisher offered him US$250,000 to reveal who had shot JR and he considered giving the wrong information and taking the money, but in the end, "I decided not to be so like JR in real life".

The popularity of Dallas made Hagman one of the best-paid actors in television and earned him a fortune that even a Ewing would have coveted. He lost some of it, however, in bad oil investments before turning to real estate.

"I have an apartment in New York, a ranch in Santa Fe, a castle in Ojai outside of LA, a beach house in Malibu and thinking of buying a place in Santa Monica," Hagman said in a Chicago Tribune interview.


TV LEGEND: Larry Hagman has died at the age of 81. — Photo: REUTERS.

An updated Dallas series began in June 2012 on the TNT network with Hagman reprising his JR role with original cast members Linda Gray, who played JR's long-suffering wife, Sue Ellen, and Patrick Duffy, who was his brother Bobby. The show was to focus on the sons of JR and Bobby.

Hagman had a wide eccentric streak. When he first met actress Lauren Bacall, he licked her arm because he had been told she did not like to be touched and he was known for leading parades on the Malibu beach and showing up at a grocery store in a gorilla suit. Above his Malibu home flew a flag with the credo "Vita Celebratio Est (Life Is a Celebration)" and he lived hard for many years.

In 1967, rock musician David Crosby turned him on to LSD, which Hagman said took away his fear of death, and Jack Nicholson introduced him to marijuana because Nicholson thought he was drinking too much.

Hagman had started drinking as a teenager and said he did not stop until the moment in 1992 when his doctor told him he had cirrhosis of the liver and could die within six months. Hagman wrote that for the past 15 years he had been drinking about four bottles of champagne a day, including while on the Dallas set.

LIVER TRANSPLANT

In July 1995, he was diagnosed with liver cancer, which led him to quit smoking, and a month later he underwent a liver transplant.

After giving up his vices, Hagman said he did not lose his zest for life.

"It's the same old Larry Hagman," he told a reporter. "He's just a littler sober-er."

Hagman was born on September 21, 1931, in Weatherford, Texas, and his father was a lawyer who dealt with the Texas oil barons Hagman would later come to portray. He was still a boy when his parents divorced and he went to Los Angeles with Martin, who would become a Broadway and Hollywood musical star.

Hagman eventually landed in New York to pursue acting, making his stage debut there in The Taming of the Shrew. In New York, he married Maj Axelsson in 1954 while they were in a production of South Pacific. The marriage produced two children, Heidi and Preston.

Hagman served in the Air Force, spending five years in Europe as the director of USO shows, and on his return to New York he took a starring role in the daytime soap The Edge of Night. His breakthrough came in 1965 when he landed the I Dream of Jeannie role opposite Barbara Eden.

In his later years, Hagman became an advocate for organ transplants and an anti-smoking campaigner. He also was devoted to solar energy, telling the New York Times he had a US$750,000 solar panel system at his Ojai estate, and made a commercial in which he portrayed a JR Ewing who had forsaken oil for solar power. He was a longtime member of the Peace and Freedom Party, a minor leftist organisation in California.

Hagman told the Times that after death he wanted his remains to be "spread over a field and have marijuana and wheat planted and harvest it in a couple of years and then have a big marijuana cake, enough for 200 to 300 people. People would eat a little of Larry."

http://www.stuff.co.nz/entertainment/celebrities/7994294/JR-Ewing-actor-dies-at-81

[Kiwithrottlejockey]

From the Los Angeles Times....

Larry Hagman, boyish to the end: An appreciation

By ROBERT LLOYD - Los Angeles Times Television Critic | 1:52PM - Saturday, November 24, 2012


The late Larry Hagman, star of “Dallas”, pictured in 2011. — Photo: Ron Jenkins/Fort Worth Star-Telegram/MCT.

• Los Angeles Times Photo Gallery: Larry Hagman — 1931-2012

LARRY HAGMAN, who as J.R. Ewing was famously shot but survived to finish 14 seasons and 357 episodes of "Dallas" and who rose again to lie and scheme in this year's successful revival, died Friday in Dallas, just down I-30 from Fort Worth, where he was born 81 years ago.

The son of musical-comedy star Mary Martin, Hagman worked on the New York stage through the 1950s, on and off-Broadway, then moved into movie and TV roles. But it was as the star of "I Dream of Jeannie" that he first became widely known, a good-looking, easygoing, dark-haired leading man in the mold of contemporaries like Jim Hutton and James Garner.

A knockoff "Bewitched" in which Hagman played Major Anthony Nelson, a bachelor astronaut more or less cohabiting with curvaceous female genie Barbara Eden, who called him "Master," the series, which was risque in a way about to become outdated, ran from 1965 to 1970 — its end, one might note, concurrent with the rise of the women's movement. But Hagman's easygoing approach made its weird power relationships palatable.

And then there was J.R. I can't swear, without spending some time in a library, that he was television's first antihero. Ralph Kramden might be, viewed from a certain angle, and daytime soap operas, of which Hagman was a veteran and "Dallas" a prime-time variant, were full of characters You Loved to Hate (yet really loved). But J.R. was the godfather, certainly, of Tony Soprano and Walter White, of Nucky Thompson and Al Swearengen — and their better, one feels.

Although Hagman's two great roles — the sitcom hero, the melodramatic villain — would seem remote, both depended on a native boyishness that kept him likable in situations that might otherwise have turned sour. What made J.R. attractive, after all, was not that he was a winner, albeit an unscrupulous one. What made him delightful was his capacity for delight. He treated life as a game.

Mythologically speaking, he was a "trickster," a cousin to Bre'r Rabbit, to Coyote and Loki: the beloved troublemaker the culture requires to keep things in balance. The 2012 "Dallas", whose second season was in production when Hagman died, may have pushed a young generation of Ewings to the fore, but it still depended largely on Hagman's sense of fun, on a wide smile and twinkling eye as vibrant at 80 as ever. Thinking of J.R., we reach for terms not of disapproval, but of affection: rascal, rapscallion. His charm was puckish.

If the actor was technically too old to be even an old hippie, he was a bit of one, anyway. He bathed in the Esalen hot springs with Alan Watts. He lived for many years on the beach in Malibu, where a flag reading "Vita celebratio est" (Life is a celebration) flew at his house, and later in the arty climes of Ojai. He was a member of California's Peace and Freedom Party and an advocate for solar power.

Hagman had a long, bad history with alcohol and nicotine, the drugs of his generation. (He had a liver transplant in 1995, and it was throat cancer that killed him.) He quit both but remained a devotee — that seems to be the apt word — of marijuana, to which Jack Nicholson introduced him, thinking it might help cut down on his drinking. (Characteristically, that vice tended toward champagne.) And he wrote and spoke glowingly of his experience with LSD, which, he said, opened him to "the oneness of the universe" and rid him — I am glad to think today — of any fear of death.

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/tv/showtracker/la-et-st-larry-hagman-appreciation-20121124,0,415922.story

[reality]

....."A knockoff "Bewitched" in which Hagman played Major Anthony Nelson, a bachelor astronaut"

....doesnt sound correct.....could the LA Times be wrong??

[nitpicker1]

....."A knockoff "Bewitched" in which Hagman played Major Anthony Nelson, a bachelor astronaut"

....doesnt sound correct.....could the LA Times be wrong??

yep

"I dream of Jeannie" was Hagman's