Photo: George Maharis | By Mike Barnes and Duane Byrge, The Hollywood Reporter / Yahoo | George Maharis, who starred as the brooding Buz Murdock on Route 66 before he quit the acclaimed 1960s CBS drama after contracting hepatitis, has died. He was 94.
Maharis died Wednesday at his home in Beverly Hills, his longtime friend and caregiver Marc Bahan told The Hollywood Reporter.
Route 66, created by Stirling Silliphant and Herbert B. Leonard, featured the Hell’s Kitchen native Murdock and Martin Milner‘s Yale dropout Tod Stiles touring the highways of America in Tod’s Chevrolet Corvette, encountering adventure along the way.
The show “was really kind of a searching or what you may have seen hundreds of years ago where the people came over the mountains to go from one place to the other to find a better life, a place where they belonged, and they didn’t rely on anybody else to do it for them,” Maharis told The Seattle Times in 2008.
All 116 installments of the series over four seasons starting in October 1960 were filmed in cities across the U.S., making for a grueling production schedule.
Midway through the third season in late 1962, Maharis came down with hepatitis, was hospitalized for a month and missed several episodes. (On the show, it was explained that Buz was in a Cleveland hospital battling an “echo-virus,” and Tod got a new traveling companion, Lincoln Case, played by Glenn Corbett).
Maharis returned to Route 66 but didn’t stay long, suffering a relapse. “The doctor said, ‘If you don’t get out now, you’re either going to be dead or you’re going to have permanent liver damage,’ ” Maharis recalled in a 2007 interview.
Maharis, who had received an Emmy nomination in 1962 for playing Buz, said it took him more than two years before he was able to regularly work again.
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