Chuck Connors

Connors graduated from Adelphi Academy, a private high school in Brooklyn, New York, in 1940. He was offered numerous scholarships but chose to attend Seton Hall College (now Seton Hall University) and played basketball, football & baseball. His college studies were interrupted when he was enlisted in the United States Army in 1942 in Fort Knox, Kentucky.

Leaving Seton Hall after two years, on October 20, 1942, aged 21, he joined the army, listing his occupation as a ski instructor. After enlistment in the infantry at Fort Knox, he later served mostly as a tank-warfare instructor at Camp Campbell, Kentucky, and then finally at West Point.

Following his discharge early in 1946, he resumed his athletic pursuits.

He played center for the Boston Celtics in the 1946-47 season but left early for spring training with the Brooklyn Dodgers.

Baseball had always been Connors' first love, and for the next several years he knocked about the minor leagues in such places as Rochester (NY), Norfolk (VA), Newark (NJ), Newport News (VA), Mobile (AL) and Montreal, Canada (while in Montreal he met Elizabeth Riddell, whom he married in October 1948. They had four sons during their 13-year marriage).

He finally reached his goal, playing for the Brooklyn Dodgers, in May 1949, but after just five weeks and one at-bat, he returned to Montreal.

Before the 1940 baseball season, he was signed by the Brooklyn Dodgers as an amateur free agent. On October 10, 1950, he was traded by the Brooklyn Dodgers -- with whom he had appeared with in one game in 1949 -- with Dee Fondy to the Chicago Cubs for Hank Edwards and cash. He spent part of the 1951 season with the Cubs. He also played professional basketball with the Boston Celtics. Playing for the Boston Celtics in 1946, Chuck Connors was the first NBA player to shatter a backboard, doing so during a pre-game warm-up in the Boston Garden.

After a brief stint with the Chicago Cubs in 1951, during which he hit two home runs, Connors wound up with the Cubs' Triple-A farm team, the L. A.

Angels, in 1952.

A baseball fan who was also a casting director for MGM spotted Connors and recommended him for a part in the Spencer Tracy-Katharine Hepburn comedy Pat and Mike (1952). Originally cast to play a prizefighter, but that role went instead to Aldo Ray. Connors was cast as a captain in the state police. He now abandoned his athletic hopes and devoted full time to his acting career, which often emphasized his muscular 6'6" physique.

During the next several years Connors made 20 movies, culminating in a key role in William Wyler's 1958 western The Big Country (1958).

Also appearing in many television series, he finally hit the big time in 1958 with The Rifleman (1958), which began its highly successful five-year run on ABC. Other television series followed, as did a number of movies which, though mostly minor, allowed Connors to display his range as both a stalwart "good guy" and a menacing "heavy".

According to an article on television westerns in Time Magazine (March 30, 1959), Connors stood 6'5" tall, weighed 215 pounds, and had chest-waist-hips measurements of 45-34-41.

Suffered almost the same fate in each of his two television western series. In The Rifleman: The Vaqueros (1961), he was stripped to the waist, tied to a tree, and left to die under a scorching sun by a group of Mexican bandits. In Branded: Fill No Glass for Me: Part 2 (1965), he was stripped to the waist, tied to a tree, and left to die under a scorching sun by a group of Indian warriors. (In both cases he survived.).

His parents were Allan Connors, a longshoreman, and Marcella Lundrigan Connors, a housewife, both of Irish descent. His father was born in Dunville and his mother in St. Marys, Placentia Bay (both in the Dominion of Newfoundland, now part of Canada). Allan Connors died in 1966 and Marcella Connors died in 1971.

Took part in a parade in New York in support of the Vietnam War in 1967, and campaigned for his friend Ronald Reagan.

He smoked three packs of Camel cigarettes a day until the 1970s. He fronted anti-smoking campaigns in the mid-1970s, although in a 1987 interview he said he was still smoking one cigarette a day.

Chuck Connors was born Kevin Joseph Connors in Brooklyn, New York, to Marcella (nee Lundrigan; died 1971) and Alban Francis "Allan" Connors (died 1966), Roman Catholic immigrants of Irish descent from the Dominion of Newfoundland (now part of Canada). Chuck and his two-years-younger sister, Gloria, grew up in a working-class section of the west side of Brooklyn, where their father worked the local docks as a longshoreman. He served as an altar boy at Our Lady of Perpetual Help Basilica School and attended school there. He later became a member of the Bay Ridge Boys' Club and playing sandlot ball as a member of the Bay Ridge Celtics. A life-long Dodgers' fan, he always dreamed of a baseball career with his favorite team. His natural athletic prowess earned him a scholarship to Adelphi Academy, a private high school, and then to Seton Hall, a Catholic college in South Orange, New Jersey.

In June 1973, he befriended Soviet Secretary General Leonid Brezhnev in a meeting at the White House. Connors traveled to the Soviet Union in December 1973, and presented Brezhnev with two Colt revolvers. In 1982, he asked his friend President Ronald Reagan if he could attend Brezhnev's funeral service, but he was not allowed to be part of the official US delegation.

Accepted the role of Mr. Slausen in Tourist Trap (1979) because he wanted to "become the Boris Karloff of the '80s".

He was awarded a Star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6838 Hollywood Boulevard in Hollywood, California on July 18, 1984.

Inducted into the Hall of Great Western Performers of the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum in 1991.

Almost one year before his death, his first wife, Elizabeth "Betty" Connors, died on February 27, 1992, after a long illness.

In a 1997 biography titled "The Man Behind the Rifle", author David Fury says that "Chuck" Connors acquired his nickname while an athlete playing first base. He had a habit of calling to the pitcher: "Chuck it to me, baby, chuck it to me!".

Lucas McCain, Connors' character on The Rifleman (1958), was ranked #32 in TV Guide's list of the "50 Greatest TV Dads of All Time" [20 June 2004 issue].