Perry King

With his handsome, square-jawed blond looks and patrician bearing, Perry King quickly landed leading roles in films and TV in the 1970s and 80s. As he aged, he gracefully made the transition to character roles, generally cast as villains or father figures. The grandson of famed book editor Maxwell Perkins, King attended prep school, earned an Ivy League education at Yale and received his acting training under John Houseman at Juilliard. After debuting on stage in the replacement cast of the Tony-winning drama "Child's Play" in 1971, he quickly landed supporting roles in two 1972 features: "Slaughterhouse-Five" cast him as the son of the main character while he was Shirley MacLaine's troubled younger brother in "The Possession of Joel Delaney." After creating a strong impression as the leather-jacketed suitor of Susan Blakely in "The Lords of Flatbush" (1974), he pursued a different career path from his co-stars Sylvester Stallone and Henry Winkler, spending most of the 70s and 80s as the romantic lead in countless TV-movies and miniseries like "Captains and the Kings" (NBC, 1976) and "The Last Convertible" (NBC, 1979). He eventually earned semi-stardom as co-star (with Joe Penney) of the adventure series "Riptide" (NBC, 1984-86).

King began to shift to character roles, playing Valerie Bertinelli's wealthy father in the 1987 CBS miniseries "I'll Take Manhattan" and later the complex Peter Pulitzer in NBC's "Roxanne: The Prize Pulitzer" (1989). He further stretched his acting muscles succeeding Ron Perlman as the villainous Col. Jessep in the Broadway production of "A Few Good Men" in 1990. After two short-lived 1993 forays into sitcoms with "The Trouble with Larry" (CBS) and "Almost Home" (ABC), he scored a modest success in the recurring role of nasty Hayley Armstrong on the Fox soap "Melrose Place" (1995). He was back to form as a romantic lead opposite Lindsay Wagner in "Their Second Chance" (Lifetime, 1997), a based-on-fact story of an adoptee who reunites her birth parents, and as a down-on-his-luck cowboy to Sean Young's movie star in the Fox family Channel's embarrassing "The Cowboy and the Movie Star" (1998). He acquitted himself better as a writing teacher who may or may not be responsible for his wife's car crash in the Lifetime movie "Her Married Lover" (2000), a gripping, edge-of-the-seat murder mystery also starring Roxana Zal as either his obsessed student or inamorata. He then returned to series TV as star of Aaron Spelling's new primetime soap "Titans" (2000), portraying Victoria Principal's ex-husband and father of prodigal son Casper Van Dien, whose former girlfriend Yasmine Bleeth now shares King's bed as his wife. King's character was killed off after only a handful of episodes and the series itself was cancelled soon thereafter.