Pernell Roberts

1928–2010

By 1965, Pernell Roberts had achieved major celebrity status playing Adam Cartwright, the suave, book-smart eldest son on the hit NBC Western series Bonanza. But that year, he shocked his fans when he quit. “Six seasons of feeling like a damned idiot, going around like a middle-aged teenager saying, ‘Yes, Pa,’ ‘No, Pa’ on cue,” he said. “It was downright disgusting—such dialogue for a grown man.”

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A Georgia native, Roberts attended Georgia Tech and the University of Maryland; at both schools, he said, “I distinguished myself by flunking out.” After a stint in the Marines, he pursued “occupations that ranged from tombstone maker to railroad riveter” before becoming an actor, said the Associated Press. In 1956, he won a Drama Desk Award for an off-Broadway production of Macbeth and appeared on Broadway in The Taming of the Shrew. Moving to Hollywood, “he landed character roles in such features as Desire Under the Elms, until Bonanza made him a star.”

The cast was headed by Lorne Greene, who played the widowed patriarch Ben, and featured Dan Blocker as the sweet but oafish middle son, Hoss, and Michael Landon as the impulsive youngest son, Little Joe. But despite the series’ genre-breaking “emphasis on character development over gunplay,” said the Los Angeles Times, Roberts thought the show trite and hated his role. “Isn’t it just a bit silly for three adult males to get father’s permission for everything they do?” he said. A political liberal and civil-rights protestor, Roberts also complained that Bonanza depicted the West as a whites-only domain.

Although Roberts never recaptured his early fame, he earned an Emmy nomination in 1981 as the title character in Trapper John, M.D., a spinoff of the TV series M*A*S*H*. Survived by his fourth wife, he outlived all his Bonanza co-stars and jokingly called himself “Pernell the-Last-One Roberts.”