Mike Connors

Krekor Ohanian didn't want to be an actor. In 1940, he played basketball at UCLA on a sports scholarship, and his future seemed to lie on the court or in the courtroom. But director William Wellman noticed his physique during a game and told him he had movie-star looks.

He was forced to change his name because Krekor Ohanian sounded too foreign for the industry at the time. First it was Touch Connors. Under that alias, he appeared in Sudden Fear in 1952. He worked with Joan Crawford and learned that in Hollywood, physical presence mattered as much as talent.

Not everything was easy in his early days.

He spent years jumping from series to series in supporting roles. In 1956, he appeared in The Ten Commandments, but no one remembered his face as they left the theater. That period of paycheck work ended when Bruce Geller knocked on his door.

The raw violence of the sixties

Geller was looking for a different kind of detective for television. In 1967, Mannix was born, and the actor reclaimed his real surname, though he kept the name Mike on his agents' advice. The series broke with the sophisticated investigator aesthetic to offer a guy who took real beatings.

Mike Connors performed almost all of his own action scenes without stunt doubles. Over the eight seasons the show ran, he suffered broken bones and several concussions. Audiences connected with that physical vulnerability. Joe Mannix was a guy who bled on screen.

And the gamble paid off.

The show stayed on the air until 1975. In its final seasons, Connors was earning $40,000 per episode, an astronomical figure by the standards of the decade. But success trapped him in a type of role he never fully escaped. He tried to change direction in 1981 with Today's FBI, but it didn't receive the same support.

The Decline of the Tough Guys

Eighties television no longer wanted Connors' grit. Audiences preferred the glitz of Miami Vice. So the actor returned to the circuit of guest appearances. He showed up on Murder, She Wrote and Walker, Texas Ranger to remind viewers that he was still active.

His last on-screen appearance was in 2007.

He appeared in one episode of the sitcom Two and a Half Men, playing a suitor of the main characters' mother. It was a cynical nod to his past as an action hero. The man who had survived fictional gunfights in the alleys of Los Angeles ended his days on a sitcom set.

In 1949, he married Mary Lou Willey, and they stayed together until his death. This is a statistically unusual outcome in a setting like the Hollywood Hills. Mike Connors died on January 26, 2017 at a hospital in Tarzana from leukemia diagnosed just one week earlier. He was 91 years old.