Pete Duel, star of the television cowboy series Alias Smith and Jones, was found shot dead at his Hollywood home yesterday. The police say that he apparently killed himself after watching the latest episode of the serial with a woman friend. The serial is shown in Britain on BBC2. Mr. Duel had played in other television serials, including The Fugitive.
Obituary
Pete Duel, the actor, one of the stars of the Alias Smith and Jones television Western series, was found shot dead in his Hollywood home yesterday. He was 31. Duel, a doctor's son, who gave up the stage for film acting, also appeared in several other television series, including The Fugitive, Combat and Love on a Rooftop, and a number of Hollywood films, including The Hell with Heroes, The Young Country, The Psychiatrist, Generation and Cannon for Cordoba.
He began acting on the stage in an off-Broadway production of Electra, but decided that Hollywood held a better future for him than Broadway.
Pete Duel was the glibber and smoother-talking
of the questionable pair Hannibal Heyes and 'Kid' Curry, alias
Smith and Jones, whose weekly adventures seen on BBC television
tended to blur the traditional outlines of the Western. Good-hearted,
amusing, high-spirited law-breakers, with none of the meanness
and moodiness customarily shared by their kind, their roots stretched
back through Butch Cassidy to Robin Hood. Their robberies were
impersonal - it was safes and not people who suffered their attentions
- they never killed or felt disposed to kill.
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