Lawrence Dane, a Canadian actor known for his TV roles on Mod Squad, Mannix and Bonanza before starring in homegrown series like Side Effects and The Red Green Show, has died. He was 84 years old.
Dane passed away March 21 at his home in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, with his wife, Laurel, and family members at his side after a long battle with pancreatic cancer, his publicist told The Hollywood Reporter. Born April 3, 1937, in Masson, Quebec, as the youngest of six children in a Lebanese family, Dane grew up in Ottawa and took early acting classes to overcome shyness.
Turns out the craft stuck with Dane. “Between then and my exit stage left on (March 21, 2022) I had the good fortune of becoming a member of a highly respected brotherhood of Canadian performers where I got to meet and work with hundreds of other struggling fellow actors. They were all an inspiration to me,” he said in a self-written obit that was unveiled on his death.
In 1958, pioneering Canadian TV producer Frank “Budge” Crawley hired Dane as an extra on a TV drama R.C.M.P., a stand-on part that led to key roles in six episodes of the series about the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Two years later, Dane went to Toronto to play a young convict on the CBC drama Shadow of a Pale Horse, and in 1965 the Canadian actor first went to Los Angeles to try his luck in Hollywood.
At 6′ 1″ in size and broad-shouldered, Dane realized his immediate future lay in playing bad guys in U.S. series, which he did on Bonanza, Mannix and The Mod Squad. “If I’d been short and cherubic, I would have starved to death. There are only two major parts on any television show, the hero and the villain. The economics of the medium don’t allow for anything else,” Dane told a 1976 profile in Maclean’s magazine.
His other U.S. TV credits included appearances on Mission: Impossible, The Virginian, The F.B.I. and Lancer. And Dane’s movie credits included It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time, Rituals, Running, Hedda Gabler, David Cronenberg’s Scanners, Millennium, It Takes Two and as private investigator Lt. Preston in the 1998 horror comedy Bride of Chucky.
Dane eventually went on to star in a number of Canadian TV shows, including Street Legal, E.N.G., La Femme Nikita and Flashpoint. He also turned to producing in the 1970s, which included projects like Gordon Pinsent’s script of The Rowdyman, the comedy Only God Knows and the 1977 indie movie Rituals, which starred Dane and Hal Holbrook.
Dane is survived by his wife Laurel Dane and extended family.
Source: Hollywood
