Michael Callan, heartthrob of the 1960s, dies at 86

Actor and dancer Michael Callan, who starred in the Broadway musical “Love, Sublime Amor” and was a movie heartthrob in the 1960s, died last Monday (10/10), victim of pneumonia. He was 86 years old.

Michael Callan was the stage name of Martin Calinoff, born in Philadelphia on November 22, 1935. He studied ballet and tap dance, as well as learning from the dancers who frequented his father’s cafeteria, and taught him the moves in exchange for milkshakes. .

His artistic debut took place on the radio show “Horn & Hardart’s Children’s Hour”. At the age of 15, he was already performing in local clubs under the name of Mickey Calin.

After graduating from high school, Calinoff moved to New York and landed a small role in the comedy “The Boy Friend” (1954), which marked Julie Andrews (“The Sound of Music”) debut on the American stage. The following year, he landed a role in another comedy, “Catch a Star!”, Before auditioning for the character of Riff in “Amor, Sublime Amor”.

At the time, it was said that he was “too good” to play the role of the leader of the Sharks gang. Even so, director and choreographer Jerome Robbins liked him and asked him to come back for another audition.

“I went to the theater and played and danced, and I heard Robbins’ voice from behind saying, ‘Can you do a somersault?'” The actor recalled in a 2006 interview. It worked. “

He spent about a year on “Love, Sublime Love”, until Joyce Selznick, a talented agent (and grandson of producer David O. Selznick) saw him on Broadway and took him to Hollywood, where executives from Columbia Pictures moved his name to Michael Callan without telling him.

Working for the studio, the actor starred in a dozen films, such as “Clay Heroes” (1959), “Aces of the Trapeze” (1959), “Pepe” (1960) and “Because They’re Young” ( 1960).

When the announcement came that the musical “Love, Sublime Amor” would be adapted for the screen, he tried to return to playing Riff, but lost the role to Russ Tamblyn in the 1961 film, directed by Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins.

In the same year, however, Callan starred in the adventure “The Mysterious Island” (1961), an adaptation of a Jules Verne classic, which was a huge commercial success, and “Holidays in Hawaii”, a continuation of the pioneering film about beach “Evilly Naive” (Gidget, 1959), in which she starred alongside Deborah Walley (the new Gidget), a future member of Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello’s Turma da Praia.

He established himself as a heartthrob after appearing shirtless in “Férias no Hawai” and embarked on a handful of projects as a romantic lead, including “Viver, Amar, Sufrer” (1962) and its sequel “Torvelinho de Paixões” (1964), in which lived a doctor in love with Barbara Eden (the “Jennie Is a Genius”), and the western “Blood Debt” (1965), as an outlaw in debt to the character of Jane Fonda.

Callan made several television appearances, but her first recurring role was on the “Occasional Wife” series. The attraction lasted only one season (between 1966 and 1967), but it served to introduce the actor to his first wife, Patricia Harty, with whom he starred in the attraction.

As “Occasional Wife”, their marriage was short-lived and they divorced in 1968. Callan remarried in 1975 to Karen Malouf, from whom he divorced in 1984.

The actor also appeared in several episodes of “The FBI” (between 1966 and 1972), “The New Centurions” (1974 to 1975), “Charlie’s Charlie” (1977 to 1981) and “Fantasy Island” (from 1978 to 1984) and “Written Murder” (from 1987 to 1994), but always as different characters. His only other recurring role only came in “Superboy” (1989-1992), as the supervillain Metallo.

In film he also made “Chains from Hell” (1983), “The Highway Killer” (1988) and “The Goblin Killer” (1995). And his last credits were in the comedy “On You” (2003), by brothers Bobby and Peter Farrelly, and in the drama “The Still Life” (2006), written and directed by Joel Miller.

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Source: Terra

Camila

Camila Luna is a writer at Gossipify, where she covers the latest movies and television series. With a passion for all things entertainment, Camila brings her unique perspective to her writing and offers readers an inside look at the industry. Camila is a graduate from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) with a degree in English and is also a avid movie watcher.