Here’s What Happened to Actor Lee Majors Before, During and After ‘The Six Million Dollar Man’

While attending Middlesboro High School, Lee excelled at football and track, and upon graduation in 1957 was the recipient of a football scholarship to Indiana University. Two years later he transferred over to Eastern Kentucky University where he also played football, but suffered a severe back injury that left him paralyzed for two weeks and had the long-term effect of making him realize that a career in sports was behind him. Although he would graduate with a degree in physical education, he was already being drawn towards the idea of acting.

On the personal front, he met and, in 1961, married Kathy Robinson. A 1965 issue of TV Mirror described their relationship as follows: “Lee saw Kathy’s picture in a local newspaper and was determined to meet her. So he wrote Kathy a letter, asking for a date. Kathy lived in Richmond, Kentucky where Lee was going to college. She was a junior in high school when she received the letter from Lee. ‘I knew who he was, of course, because he was on the football team and so good looking. I’d never met him and I certainly never imagined he’d want to go out with me,’ Katy recalls … After their first date, neither dated anyone else. Throughout football season and Christmas, Lee and Kathy fell more and more deeply in love. They became engaged in March and didn’t plan to marry until Kathy finished her senior year of high school. But Lee was planning to be a teacher and coach and would have to go wherever job job was, so one day in June they were married by a preacher in McKee, Kentucky. Kathy was going to enroll wherever Lee was teaching and finish school, but in the fall before classes began, she discovered that she was pregnant and they wouldn’t accept her.”

Their son, named Lee Jr., was born in 1962, which is the same year that the family would make the move to California so that Lee could pursue the idea of becoming an actor. The new location did not do their relationship any good. As he told TV Mirror, “Our life there was really rough on Kathy. We knew no one. I couldn’t get a job teaching, because I didn’t have a California certificate, so I took whatever jobs I cold find. Money was very tight. I went to see my agent, Dick Clayton, and he said, ‘You’re not ready for an acting job yet. You have a great deal of learning and studying to do.’ And he sent me to an acting coach.”

While Lee pushed forward, money was so tight that Kathy went to work as a bank teller, and things got worse between them as they barely saw each other because of their schedules. Things really collapsed at that point. Admitted Lee, “I was depressed and worried and I lock things inside myself and won’t talk. We weren’t communicating very well.” All of which led to separation and, in 1964, divorce.

That same year, he made his big screen debut in the Joan Crawford movie Strait-Jacket and, in 1965, on TV in episodes of Gunsmoke and Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Then came a major turn of events when he beat out 400 other hopefuls, including Burt Reynolds, for a starring role in The Big Valley.

The Big Valley aired on ABC between 1965 and 1969. The setting is the mid-to-late 1800s on the Barkley Ranch in Stockton, California. The focus is on one of the wealthiest families there, including matriarch Victoria Barley (Barbara Stanwyck), eldest son Jarrod Thomas (Nanny and the Professor’s Richard Long), youngest son Nicholas “Nick” Jonathan (Peter Breck), daughter Audra (Linda Evans) and illegitimate son Heath (Lee).

In 1968 Lee was back on the big screen, costarring with Charlton Heston in the film Will Penny, followed in 1969 by an acclaimed performance in The Ballad of Andy Crocker, an installment of The ABC Movie of the Week. “He’s a Vietnam vet struggling to get back into civilian or ‘normal’ life,” details Michael McKenna, author of The ABC Movie of the Week: Big Movies for the Small Screen. “That was important, because they weren’t doing a lot of those movies in 1969 and Vietnam was, of course, a controversial issue. It was fairly sensitive with the culture clash of the Vietnam vet with a crew cut running into hippies on Sunset Blvd. and that sort of thing. You know, one of the things that TV doesn’t get the credit for is dealing with issues, sometimes long before feature films were dealing with Vietnam, which they would do later with things like The Deer Hunter and Platoon.”

Once The Big Valley was cancelled in 1969, Lee signed a long-term contract with Universal Studios. This led him to join the Western The Virginian for its final season in 1970, and then, in 1971, joining the cast of Owen Marshall, Counselor at Law as Jess Brandon, partner to Arthur Hill’s title character. He starred in a few more ABC movies, including one that turned out to be the pilot for a series, The Six Million Dollar Man.

In his personal life, Lee had found love again. During his run on The Big Valley, his publicist had come across the photo of Farrah Fawcett, who was trying to break into Hollywood. Although things got off to a bumpy start, they gradually fell in love with each other and were considered by many to be inseparable. On July 28, 1973, the fifth anniversary of their first date, the duo were married, neither one of them aware at that time how their respective stardoms were about to explode, Lee on The Six Million Dollar Man and Farrah on Charlie’s Angels.

Based on the Martin Caidin novel Cyborg (and eventually to be the subject of a film reboot starring Mark Wahlberg as The Six Billion Dollar Man), The Six Million Dollar Man began as a 1973 TV movie. In it, Lee plays Colonel Austin who, following a terrible accident of an experimental ship, is near death but saved by a secret government agency that replaces an arm, an eye and his legs with bionic implants. As a result, he has incredible strength in that arm, telescopic and microscopic vision with his eye, and can can leap great distances and run up to 60 miles per hour with his legs. All of this, despite Austin’s protests to the contrary, sees him employed to carry out secret missions. The success of that film led to two others — The Six Million Dollar Man: Wine, Women and War and The Six Million Dollar Man: The Solid Gold Kidnapping. A weekly series would follow in 1974.

“At first I was really hesitant,” Lee admits, “because when they sent me the script it was called Cyborg, and it was about a guy who jumped tall buildings and all this. Not so many years earlier one of the hottest shows on television was Batman, and it was so campy, which made it fun, but I didn’t want this to be a campy show. They promised me that it wouldn’t. We did the first pilot and it was very good; I really enjoyed that. And then we did a second movie, and [writer/producer] Glen Larson was involved. Then it turned a little bit toward James Bond, and I wasn’t quite comfortable with that persona for Steve Austin.”

“It was too cutesy,” he elaborates. “I mean, they had a theme song with Dusty Springfield singing ‘The Six Million Dollar Man,’ you know? It was all jazzed up. I’ll give you an example of a scene. I’m in a tuxedo at a party in Monte Carlo, say. I go out on the balcony and, with my bionic eye, I zoom out to his beautiful yacht out there and see how many guards there are. I take my tuxedo off, turn it inside out, zip it up, and it’s a wetsuit. I pull out this little thing about the size of a bullet, put it in my mouth, and that’s supposed to make me breathe all the way out there underwater. It was this whole gimmicky thing in the James Bond-style, and, again, I just wasn’t comfortable with that.”

Despite his discomfort level with those TV movies, he’s glad they did them because they provided multiple opportunities to work the kinks out of the concept. Then, of course, after the airing of the final film, ABC decided to go weekly with it and Lee pleaded with everyone involved to make the character “more human and honest and play down the bionics of doing a bionic thing every five minutes,” he says. “Only use them when it’s important. Also, no blood; we don’t kill people. If you notice, every time I had a fight with somebody or a bunch of guys or whatever, as I was leaving you’d see them rolling over, so nobody was ever dead. I wanted the show to be for kids, too. A family show, and it turned out that way to a large degree.”

Sometimes, the show ran a little darker than he liked and he did push to lighten things up, and he was desperate for Steve to get involved in a relationship. “The first two years,” Lee explains, “were really kind of boring to me. We’d be shooting out of town in an industrial park in a warehouse, or somewhere in an electric plant, or out in the woods and I’d be fighting some other robot, or Bigfoot [it’s true — and it was awesome] or bunches of bad people, and I just got tired of it. That’s why after two years I said, ‘Guys, look, I haven’t had a love interest on this show, and I’m tired of looking at these hairy-legged guys running around here for two years, almost three.’ And that’s when we brought in Lindsay Wagner to be the first love interest, and that went over well. People were really getting to the point where it was, like, ‘When’s this guy going to come out of the closet here?'”

Lindsay was tennis pro Jaime Sommers, Steve Austin’s former sweetheart. The two are reunited and fall in love again, but then Jaime is nearly killed in a parachuting accident. Steve pleads with his boss (and, by then, friend), Oscar Goldman (Richard Anderson), to save Jamie by giving her bionic parts. He does so reluctantly, and she survives. The bionic lovers are thrilled, but then her body rejects the bionics and she actually dies. It was a devastating moment for the audience and for Steve. Little d we know, though, is that Jaime lives; they’ve secretly managed to save her life so that she can have her own spin-off show, The Bionic Woman. Good news, right? Unfortunately, most of her memory has been lost and she has no memory of Steve, so they’re starting all over again and it’s a long road.

The Six Million Dollar Man was canceled after five seasons, which Lee actually found surprising. “After five years we were still going strong,” he points out, “but the networks really started to dilute us. That’s what networks do. They say, ‘If you like ice cream, if you like that ice cream cone, we’re gonna give you a double dipper. We’ll give you two scoops.’ And that’s what they do. They give you The Bionic Woman, and then it’s, like, ‘Oh, you like that? Well, we’re gonna give you a bionic dog.’ They actually came to me and said they had a bionic dog and I said, ‘That’s not going in my show. You can give that to Lindsay for The Bionic Woman, but I’m not having that damn dog in my show.'”

He does have a point. That bionic dog, Max, did appear on the spin-off series but, on the main show, we were introduced to actor Monte Markham as the seven million dollar man (both his arms were bionic, hence the extra million), and Vincent Van Patten played the bionic boy. Neither got their own show (thankfully), but what did happen was that a variety show of the time, The Captain and Tennille, featured a recurring vignette called “The Bionic Watermelon” which was about — you guessed it — a watermelon with bionic implants that fought crime.

Fast-forward to 1987, and the TV movie The Return of the Six Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman in which we learn Jamie, who is reunited with Steve, got conked on the head and remembers everything the two of them meant to each other, but can’t handle the emotions of it all. Meanwhile, Steve’s son, who he had abandoned years ago (that ain’t right, Steve!), is a pilot who is (yep) severely injured and, thanks to his dad’s coming to Oscar again, is equipped with bionic parts. The idea was that this kid, played by Tom Schanley, could possibly get his own series. What we got instead, two years later, was Bionic Showdown, in which Jaime helps Kate Mason, formerly restricted to a wheelchair, deal with her new bionic implants.

Lee laughs, “See, they were still trying to do spin-offs. They had this wonderful young actress, just super nice, who I think got $2,500 for the two-hour movie, and it was Sandra Bullock. That’s where she kind of got started, and they wanted her to be another bionic girl in another spin-off. Bionic kids, bionic this, bionic that. Maybe they’ll do another reunion soon and it will be The Bionic Divorce, because in the last reunion movie we did (1994’s Bionic Ever After?), we got married. So maybe a divorce is coming up. That could get some ratings.”

As much as Lee enjoyed The Six Million Dollar Man, there was a certain relief when the show finally came to an end after those five seasons. “It was near 100 episodes,” he offers, “and it was grueling. The hours were really, really long, and I lived on the lot. I had an apartment there. I got it there since I was under contract at Universal; back then they had apartments and I stayed on the lot almost the entire week. I’d go home on weekends, because it was just too far to go — I lived in Malibu — and otherwise I’d be driving back at five or six in the morning after shooting until seven or eight at night. I just didn’t have a life for five years, and I was trying to maintain a marriage there with another popular girl.”

That popular girl was the late Farrah Fawcett (then with the hyphenated last name of Majors), who had soared to phenomenal success as part of the original cast of Charlie’s Angels. Their dual success ultimately resulted in the end of their marriage. “I ended up seeing her two weeks in one year,” says Lee wistfully. “She was off doing films and stuff, and doing her series, and I was doing mine. That’s mainly the reason we got divorced; we never saw each other. We stayed great friends, but we just had our own careers going and didn’t have time for each other.”

Hoping to parlay his Six Million Dollar Man success into a movie career, Lee starred in several films, among them The Norseman, Killer Fish and Steel in 1979, and Agency in 1980. Unfortunately none of them scored and he found himself back on TV, where he was cast in the aforementioned The Fall Guy. Getting more involved than usual, he sang the show’s theme song and served as producer and director. As Lee told Den of Geek, “I wanted to so something to get away from Six Mill, and a producer friend of mine asked me to do The Fall Guy. Even though I did it for five years, The Fall Guy still didn’t take away the impact of Steve Austin. To this day, Six Mill was the hottest series I did, even though, for me, it’s Big Valley I liked very much.”

Work entered and left his life on the big and small screens, and so did romance. In 1988 he married Playboy Playmate Karen Velez, with whom he had three children: daughter Nikki Loren and twin sons Dane Luke and Trey Kulley. The couple divorced in 1994. Then, on November 1, 2002, he married actress and model Faith Cross, to whom he’s still married and is very much in love with.

Most recently he had a recurring role in the horror-comedy series Ash vs. Evil Dead, playing Brock Williams, father to Ash Williams (played by Bruce Campbell). As Bruce expressed to us in an exclusive interview, there was the kind of joy of meeting and working with Lee Majors that any fanboy could identify with.

“He was the first choice to play Ash’s completely irresponsible and inappropriate father,” laughs Bruce. “Now this is not normally his bag these days; he does Hallmark movies and things like that. But God bless him, he’s got a great, twisted sense of humor and we had a great time talking about The Six Million Dollar Man. See, that’s why I’m in this dumb business, because occasionally you get to run into people you admire like Lee. He’s an iconic television actor. He’s been in three shows over a hundred episodes each. You stick around long enough, you get to work with really cool people.”