Davy Jones, 1945–2012

Davy Jones was a promising 18-year-old actor when he appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1964 with the cast of the Broadway musical Oliver! After the cast finished their number, Jones heard the audience erupt in screams. But it wasn’t for him: It was for the Beatles, also booked on the same show. “I saw the girls going crazy and thought to myself, ‘I want a piece of that!’” he said. Soon after, he gave up the theater and auditioned to be the front man of a made-for-television band called the Monkees. They ended up being the biggest pop act on the planet, outselling the Beatles and the Rolling Stones in 1967.

Born in the northern English city of Manchester, Jones was a child star, appearing on television and stage, including as the Artful Dodger in a London production of Oliver!, said The New York Times. When the show came to Broadway in 1963, he earned a Tony nomination and the attention of TV producers Bob Rafelson and Bert Schneider, who were creating a series that would follow the comedic adventures of a Beatles-inspired band. They hired Jones to play “the role of ‘cute’ Beatle Paul McCartney,” said The Washington Post.

“Although initially dismissed in music circles as a television fantasy more than a musical reality,” the Monkees charted nearly two dozen singles after the show debuted on NBC in 1966, and became the first and only act to score four No. 1 albums on the Billboard chart in the same year, said the Los Angeles Times. Cracks started to appear when the band members tried to assert control over their music. Their first attempt at artistic freedom, the 1968 album The Birds, the Bees & the Monkees, impressed neither critics nor their teenage fans, and in 1971, after several more flops, the group split.

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Although comfortable with his highest-profile job, Jones worried that the Monkees’ legacy would follow him for the rest of his acting life. “My biggest fear, years ago when I played Jesus in Godspell,” he said last year, “was that I’d be dying on the cross one night and someone would yell out, ‘Hey Davy! Do “Daydream Believer”!’”