Here’s What Happened to Actor David Janssen Before, During and After Starring in ‘The Fugitive’

He was actually born David Harold Meyer on March 27, 1931, in Naponee, Nebraska. His father, Harold Edward Meyer, was a banker, while his mother, Berniece Graf, had her own background in showbiz that would actually help move David in the direction of an entertainment career. In a June 30, 1957 profile of David, The Post-Standard of Syracuse, New York noted that his mother was actually Miss Nebraska in 1928 and placed sixth in the Miss America finals. After that, calling herself Bernice Dalton, she became a Ziegfeld Follies showgirl and shortly thereafter married Harold Meyer.

At the age of six months, it noted, David won the town’s “prettiest baby” contest. “As a year-old baby,” they continued, “David began traveling when his mother went on tour in Rio Rita and other musicals. Growing up backstage, he learned to sing, dance, play the piano and the accordion. In 1942, Mrs. Meyer settled in Hollywood where she became a top photographer’s model and played small roles in the movies. She divorced Meyer (now a bank executive in York, Nebraska) and later married Eugene Janssen, a Los Angeles business man.”

For his part, David took his stepfather’s surname and began to study drama. By the time he enrolled in Fairfax High School at the age of 14, he had appeared in six movies. He spent a summer performing on stage in the so-called “straw hat circuit” in Ogunquit and Kennebunkport, Maine. He rehearsed a pair of plays that never made it to Broadway and in response decided to return to Hollywood and focus on movies. In 1951 Universal-International signed him for the film Yankee Buccaneer. The following year he entered the Army and served in special services at Fort Ord, California. But entertainment was never far from his heart.

In May 1953, the Santa Cruz Sentinel covered the “Shellzapoppin” GI talent show, noting, “Things got off to a fine start with handsome, smiling Pfc. David Janssen as master of ceremonies. This genial GI, who has the distinction of being the only enlisted man now under contract with a major studio, ‘warmed up’ the audience with a few observations on army life. ‘There’s the right way, the wrong way and the army way,’ he said.”

When he was discharged the following year, the Valley Times of North Hollywood let everyone know that his return to the big screen was imminent: “David Janssen is set to resume his career in the featured role of a young Army lieutenant in Chief Crazy Horse. Janssen’s last assignment before starting his two-year stretch in the Army was U-I’s Bonzo Goes to College.”

He followed Chief Crazy Horse with Cult of the Cobra, Francis in the Navy, The Private War of Major Benson, To Hell and Back, All that Heaven Allows and The Square Jungle (all 1955), and Never Say Goodbye, The Toy Tiger, Francis in the Haunted House, Away All Boats, Showdown at Abilene and The Girl He Left Behind (all 1956), and filmed Lafayette Escadrille (1958). Interestingly, the Press and Sun-Bulletin of Binghamton, New York made the observation that since leaving the military, seven of his movie roles saw him playing men in the military. “I was on active duty for two years,” he reflected to the paper in 1955. “I returned to this wonderful land of glamor, bright lights, beautiful girls and comfortable living. And inside of one whole week I had a spot as a cavalry captain in Chief Crazy Horse. And it didn’t end there. Three weeks later I’m crawling flat on my stomach at Anzio with Audie Murphy in To Hell and Back. And a month later I’m a corporal in Cult of the Cobra.”

By 1957, David had made guest star appearances on such shows as Boston Blackie, Sheriff of Cochise, Conflict, U.S. Marshall, The Millionaire and four episodes of the anthology show, Dick Powell’s Zane Grey Theater. In 1957 (and running until 1960), he took the starring role on Richard Diamond, Private Detective, which was based on the radio drama of the same name. In it, David plays the titular character, a former cop with the NYPD who is now a private detective operating in a film noir-like world. In each episode, he either agrees to take on a case for $100 a day plus expenses, or when requested to by a desperate friend.

Enthused the San Francisco Examiner in 1957, “Richard Diamond, Private Detective is a video variation on Dick Powell’s old radio whodunit. It lacks the suspense of the original that paid off in an era when private eyes were the rage of radio and Sam Spade was supreme. Nevertheless, it’ll be a star-maker for youthful, debonair David Janssen, who takes over where Powell began. He’s calm, confident and cautious in his professional sleuthing. He looks good, acts good, sounds good. Last week’s opus was a hum-and-drum half hour about a kidnapped heiress whom Janssen rescued with no resistance from the unimaginative writers. The show failed to impress me, Janssen did. He’ll go places in television.”

In 1958, in the midst of shooting the show, David mused to the Los Angeles Times, “You know, my life has been an odd mixture of success and failure. Mostly success, but failure always seemed to rear its ugly head. Every inch of the way has been a struggle for me. You don’t know how good it feels to be known as a person who can pay his bills. It’s a wonderful feeling. Believe me, it wasn’t always that way. I’m satisfied with my work, but when Diamond no longer entertains the audience, which I hope will never happen, I’d like to move on to motion pictures or the stage. [But] I think the series will continue for a good while. I believe the audience likes authenticity and they get this from Diamond. He’s the kind of guy who’s human. He makes mistakes. He doesn’t always win. We have had 15 different directors working on this and that versatility keeps the show fresh. It’s a task trying to keep a show moving for 24 minutes, but I think we’re doing it.”

In the same interview he was asked about the biggest difference between Richard Diamond and himself: “The only radical difference is that if someone pointed a loaded gun in my direction, I’d run. He wouldn’t.”

With Richard Diamond ending its run, David focused again on movies. By March of 1961, the media noted that in the past year he had shot 10 episodes of the TV show, spent a month working summer stock, filmed his own TV pilot and six films in which he was in practically every scene. He was asked by the Santa Cruz Sentinel if he was worried about overexposure. “I see no reason why actors shouldn’t keep the same hours as any other working man,” he replied. “Besides, I love money. ‘Overexposure’ is a word that’s cropped up in Hollywood talk the last few years. I don’t think there can be such a thing for a younger actor. I feel I’m serving my apprenticeship. An actor has to be seen to make stardom. There’s only one road to success in this town: lots of work, good scripts and sensible casting.”

Ed Robertson, author of The Fugitive Recaptured and host of the classic television podcast TV Confidential, suggests, “I would say David Janssen is one of the most under appreciated actors of, certainly, my generation and perhaps the last two generations. When I wrote The Fugitive Recaptured, I spoke to Stan Whitmore, who wrote the pilot episode and three or four others in the first season. He got to know him a bit during that first year and felt that Janssen didn’t realize what a good performer he was. He said he also desired to be a film actor, and people like that used television as a stepping stone. Television was considered the minor leagues. The majors was being a movie star, and even though Janssen enjoyed great success on television, first with Richard Diamond, Private Detective and then with The Fugitive, and did pretty much every anthology show there was before The Fugitive, he didn’t seem to value his success in television, because it meant he wasn’t a movie star.”

David proceeded to start making guest appearances again, and as he told the Star-Gazette of Elmira, New York, after Richard Diamond he was not refusing to do another series, but he was sitting out a cycle. “What is a cycle?” he asked rhetorically. “It’s the current trend where nine out of 10 series stars aren’t really stars, but just supporting players. Let’s call it the ‘guest star’ cycle. Maybe it’s not a cycle and it’s here to stay. I’m not complaining, because this is all good — for me, that is. The guest star gets the choicest lines, the best opportunity to display acting prowess. In my case, my guest roles have afforded me acting challenges that are paying off big. Now I’m not knocking my series. I would play Diamond again, I’m sure, but if they brought it back, it would have a guest star format where before, good scripts or bad, I at least carried the series.”

The most impactful project of David’s career, The Fugitive, made its debut in September 1963 and ran until August 1967. Created by Roy Huggins and produced by Quinn Martin, the focus is on Dr. Richard Kimble, wrongly accused and convicted of murdering his wife, everyone ignoring his claim that the actual killer was a one-armed man. Sentenced to death, he’s en route to his fate by train, which suffers a massive derailment, allowing him to escape and begin his quest to find that one-armed man. In pursuit is Police Lieutenant Philip Gerard (Barry Morse). In each episode, Kimble moves from town to town in his quest, meeting and interacting with a wide array of characters, always living with the very real fear that the truth could be exposed and constantly trying to elude Gerard.

David sang the praises of the show to the Los Angeles Times in 1963, commenting, “I feel it’s a new approach; a premise that has not been attempted before on TV. I also feel it’s a good opportunity not only for me as an individual, but for me as an actor. I play Dr. Richard Kimble, but as a fugitive, I am unable to practice medicine. One week I might take a job as a farmhand, which brings a new set of problems. Then I might be a bartender with another set of problems. I’m still the same basic character, but each week I have to adapt to different problems, just as we all do in real life. Richard Diamond, on the other hand, was the same kind of guy week-to-week. Every reaction was channeled along the same area, because the character itself produced the reaction. Not so much with The Fugitive, where we get a little closer to the truth, the way life really is. As a result, the new role is more of a challenge.”

Getting involved with The Fugitive was actually a surprise for him. “When I completed three years of the Richard Diamond series, I figured I was eligible to advance to the big time: movies,” he expressed to The Troy Record of Troy, New York in 1963. “Only I found this wasn’t so anymore. Of the five movies I’d made since being Richard Diamond, I’m only proud of two. I discovered that even with million dollar budgets, there are bad movies that don’t compare with the best in television. I wasn’t particularly proud of Richard Diamond either; it was pure escape nonsense with me as an expensively tailored private eye who showed nary a scratch for the hair-breadth escapes from death he underwent every week.”

In its day, The Fugitive may not have been a ratings juggernaut, but it was nonetheless a show that connected with the audience in a big way — something of a surprise to David. “When it first went into production,” he related to the Santa Maria Times of Santa Maria, California in 1967, “I didn’t think of it as having any social significance. I considered it merely realistic dramatic entertainment. It is amazing, but The Fugitive became a sort of morality play for a lot of people. I recently returned from my first trip to Europe. I was amazed to discover how many people in other countries enjoy the show. The theme of The Fugitive has universality. Perhaps that’s why it translates so easily into different languages. Maybe in all of us there is a feeling of having been wrongly accused in some way. Viewers have a degree of personal involvement that only they can testify to. I certainly don’t feel qualified to speak in sweeping terms, but I do believe that every successful show has three important ingredients: production, entertainment and a sense of personal involvement. I think The Fugitive fits that description.”

That sense of personal involvement is the reason that Leonard Goldberg, an executive at ABC at the time before he became a television producer, fought against the network’s intent on just letting the show end without a real climax, as was the norm in those days. If ABC had its way, the audience would have been left with the impression that Kimble was still on the run, hunting for the one-armed man through all eternity. In an interview with the Archive of American Television, Leonard explains, “I went to the president of the network and said to him, ‘We can’t just end the series with another episode. People who have been watching the series have to see it resolved. He and other senior members of management looked at me like I was crazy and said, ‘What are you talking about? It’s over.’ I said, ‘It’s not over. They’ve invested in this for four years. We’ve got to come to a conclusion.’”

In the end, he convinced the network that it was the right thing to do, and the audience got its ending with Kimble — and Gerard in close pursuit — finding that one-armed man and finally clearing his name. That episode, titled “The Judgment,” aired on August 22 and August 29, 1967 and was the highest-rated TV show up until that time.  “What the ratings illustrated to me,” says Goldberg, “was the very people who made television, who controlled television, saw the numbers and knew that 20 million people were watching, but thought that they were just watching and didn’t care. I thought, ‘What a sad commentary on our business that the people in charge don’t believe in the power of their own medium.’ You realize that the people who tune in actually do care about these characters and they want to see what happens at the end.”

As far as David was concerned, the timing of the conclusion was perfect. “I think we had explored all the story possibilities,” he opined. “We stopped while we were ahead. When the last segment was finished, all the people involved, both cast and crew, felt it was a job well done. There wasn’t that ‘Auld Lang Syne’ feeling of sadness that it was all over.”

He added, “Now I’m looking forward to a long vacation before becoming very active as an actor again. It could be on the stage, television, radio, movies — I’m more interested in the project than the medium. I just hope I can find something that interests me as much as The Fugitive has.”

The Fugitive would be the basis of the 1993 film of the same name starring Harrison Ford as Richard Kimble and Tommy Lee Jones as Inspector Gerard; a 2000 TV reboot with Tim Daly as Kimble, Mykeiti Williamson as Gerard and Stephen Lang as the one-armed man; and a 2020 series for Quibi with Boyd Holbrook as Mike Ferro, a cop accused of a terrorist act, and Kiefer Sutherland as the cop chasing him, Detective Clay Bryce.

In 1968, David found himself a star of John Wayne’s pro-Vietnam film The Green Berets. In it, he plays reporter George Beckworth. Although reluctant to do so, he did speak about the film and his outlook on the war with the New York Daily News on March 3, 1968. “I just don’t believe in airing my views,” he said. “Actors shouldn’t become involved in politics anyway. I have too many other things to do than bother about the implications of the Vietnam situation … But all I know is that our boys are dying over there. I don’t think you can turn your back on them. My own views on the war change from day to day. Sometimes I think it’s a war of aggression and we ought to get out of there. But other times, I’m convinced it’s communism and we ought to continue sending our boys supplies and guns. Since we are caught up in the mess, I think we should do everything to win it.”

Between 1968’s The Shoes of the Fisherman and 1981’s Inchon, David starred in 12 feature films. On television he found a new creative outlet for himself in the form of TV movies, appearing in 20 of them starting with 1970’s Night Chase and concluding with 1980’s City in Fear. Among them were two 90-minute Harry O films that would be spun off into a television series. He also fell in love with the idea of the TV miniseries after narrating Centennial and appearing in the final episode. Yet despite all of this, he still found himself drawn to the idea of an episodic series.

Looking at the quantity of TV movies the actor made, Ed comments, “Throughout the ’70s he had a large Q-rating, the equivalent of the ‘it factor.’ Viewers knew who David Janssen was, which is why the networks were looking for projects for him. He didn’t do much in the way of guest star appearances after The Fugitive — a two-hour Cannon comes to mind — and I don’t know whether that was a decision he made or if his manager suggested it, but it kind of fueled the star mystique. He was offered so many TV movies, he didn’t need to do guest shots and it allowed him to play different characters.”

In 1971 he starred in O’Hara, U.S. Treasury, which was created by Dragnet’s Jack Webb. In it, he plays Nebraska county sheriff Jim O’Hara, who, after his wife and child die in a fire, changes his life, filing an application with the United States Department of the Treasury, which takes him on. “Jack Webb asked me if I’d like to be involved,” David recalled. “I went to Washington to study the Treasury Department. I spent about nine weeks in Washington. I was briefed on every aspect of the department and while I’m not qualified to actually function as an agent in reality, intellectually I know what the job is. In the scripts I function as part of one of several divisions.”

He elaborated with the New York Daily News, “It will be based on the files of the Treasury Department, which offers a wealth of storylines since the Treasury is in charge of customs, engraving, printing, narcotics, illegal firearms, the Secret Service and the Coast Guard. My role will be that of a special agent and I won’t have a partner.”

And that latter point, according to Jack Webb in an interview he gave TV Guide in the July 22, 1972 issue, was part of the reason the show didn’t work. “We were on too early, up against The Brady Bunch and The Partridge Family,” he said, “and the early hours belong to the young in this country. Then, too, probably David Janssen — who is one of the finest television actors we have — should have had a sidekick; somebody to work with. Very few shows are successful with just one continuing character.”

David saw the situation differently. “We started the series with complete government cooperation,” he told the Sacramento Bee in 1974. “But once we got into shooting, we were hampered at every turn. We couldn’t tell the stories the way we wanted to tell them, because our technical advisers were always afraid. We couldn’t show O’Hara having a drink in a bar, for fear people would think Treasury agents drank on the job. We couldn’t show O’Hara having a relationship with a woman, because the Treasury Department was afraid the public would feel agents fooled around on the job. The situation got so ridiculous that the series eventually wasn’t much more than a shallow recruiting commercial for the Treasury Department.”

Adds Ed Robertson, “You can’t really pin the show’s failure on Janssen. Jack Webb put him in a show where he took away all of the charm of David Janssen. Basically he was playing Joe Friday, only instead of LAPD, he was a treasury guy. It was a typical Jack Webb show where the character was secondary and actors had to conform to the limitations of a Jack Webb character with virtually no emotion whatsoever.”

His final TV series brought him full circle on television, as his role in Harry O is that of private detective Harry Orwell, a former cop who was shot while on duty and suffers from bouts of back trauma (which struck at critical moments in early episodes in an effort to artificially up the drama). The show — spun off from the TV movies Such Dust as Dreams Are Made On and Smile Jenny, You’re Dead — ran from 1974 to 1976. Its initial ratings were only fair, but following retooling they rose dramatically. Despite this, it was cancelled by incoming network president Fred Silverman, who wanted to change ABC’s image. Thus he got rid of Harry O and brought in Charlie’s Angels, the irony being that Farrah Fawcett had actually been a recurring character on Harry O as Harry’s girlfriend, Sue Ingham. Believing Harry was his best character ever, a furious David swore it would be his last TV series.

David had two wives, his first being model and interior decorator Ellie Graham. The two of them were married in 1958 in Las Vegas, and went through an extremely acrimonious divorce a decade later. In 1975, he married model and actress Dani Crayne Greco, the two of them remaining together until his death from a massive heart attack on February 13, 1980. For much of his life, David was a heavy drinker and he smoked four packs of cigarettes a day, all of which took its toll. When he died, he was a little more than a month away from his 49^th birthday.

In the aftermath of his passing, Gary Deeb, writing for the Times-Advocate of Escondido, California, noted, “The death of Janssen at age 49 represents more than just the passing of another Hollywood celebrity.  It literally robs television of one of the few stars whose talent and personality were ideally suited to the peculiar requirements of that 21-inch screen in everybody’s living room.”

A few months before his death, David was interviewed by The San Francisco Examiner, for which he was looking back on his life. “There haven’t been a lot of peaks and valleys in my career, and I’m grateful for that,” he related. “In retrospect, I haven’t worried much about where my next job was coming from. I’ve always felt I was qualified to play any part in a script. I’ve never felt the fear of not working, but I can understand the anxiety of actors who think that not getting top billing is the end of their careers. Like the English, I believe any part is worth playing if it makes a contribution.”