Dan Haggerty portrayed Grizzly Adams

Dan Haggerty portrayed a gentle mountain man with a beautiful beard and a bear named Ben in the 1974 film “The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams” and on the NBC television series of the same name. , died Friday in Burbank, California.

While Mr. Haggerty was working as a stuntman and zookeeper in Hollywood, a producer asked him to appear in some scenes of a movie about a forest and a bear.

Based on the book ‘The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams’ by Charles Sellier Jr., it tells the story of a California man who is falsely accused of murder and escapes into the woods, bonding with the animals around him. and guides orphaned bears.

Mr. Haggerty agreed, but only if he could make the entire movie. The film was remade for $165,000 and ultimately grossed almost $30 million at the box office. He later moved on to television, and in February 1977 Mr. Haggerty continued his environmental work as a ranger and animal lover.

“Heartwarming,” John Leonard wrote in his review of the first episode for The New York Times. “The man and the bear hide in a wooden cabin where Mad Jack (Denver Pyle) and the red man Makuma (Don Shanks) bring gunpowder and advice. Leaving the hut, the man takes the fur while the bear washes it. By the way, there are also owls, owls, deer, rabbits, birds, birds and pumas that talk to nature with a big lump in their throat.

The generic and emotional series caught Mr. Haggerty’s attention and earned him the People’s Choice Award in 1978 as hottest new talk show performer. Two sequels to ‘Grizzly Adams’ were released: ‘Legend of the Jungle’, which was published in 1978 and released theatrically in 1981, and ‘The Capture of Grizzly Adams’, which was shown as a television movie in 1982 and for which Adams was captured with an award. hunters and eventually his name was removed.Daniel Francis Haggerty was born on November 19, 1942 in Los Angeles. His parents divorced when he was three and he had a difficult childhood; He escaped from military school several times before moving in with his actor father in Burbank, California. He married Diane Rooker at 17. The marriage ended in divorce. His second wife, the former Samantha Hilton, died in a motorcycle accident in 2008. He is survived by his children Megan, Tracy, Dylan, Cody and Don.

His first film was “Muscle Beach Party” (1964), in which he played a bodybuilder named Biff, opposite Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello. This was followed by small segments in the film involving bikers and creatures, such as characters such as ‘The Bearded Biker’ or ‘The Bandana Biker’. He made a brief appearance in “Easy Rider” as a member of a hippie commune frequented by Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper.

In real life, Mr. Haggerty lived on a small farm in Malibu Canyon with wild animals that he had trained since birth or rescued from injuries. His skills led him to work as an animal trainer and stuntman on the TV shows “Tarzan” and “Doctor” and occasionally in a movie. In 1978. “The actors didn’t like the jumping animals,” he told People magazine. and “Fremont’s Fortune Frontier” (1976). He starred as a dog trainer in David Carradine’s “Americana” (1983). He played the character Grizzly Adams in the films “Grizzly Mountain” (1997) and “Escape from Grizzly Mountain” (2000). As his career took off, Mr. Haggerty appeared in such horror films as “Night of Terror” (1
), “Elves” (1989) – in which he played Santa Claus at the beer market – and “Ax Giant: The Wrath of Paul Bunyan” (2013). In 1985, he was sentenced to 90 days in prison for selling cocaine to two undercover police officers.

In 1977, a careless restaurant patron set Mr. Haggerty’s famous beard on fire with a fiery cocktail. While trying to extinguish the fire, he suffered third-degree burns on his hands and was taken to hospital for treatment that was expected to last a month.

“For the first two days, I lay in a dark room drinking water, like a wounded wolf trying to heal itself,” he told People. “The nurses tried to give me morphine to encourage me to open my vagina. But sometimes animals know better than humans about healing. He was discharged from the hospital after 10 days