JAN-MICHAEL VINCENT

(15 July 1945 - 10 February 2019)

The American actor Jan-Michael Vincent, who has died from cardiac arrest aged 73, usually played men of action in his movie career. Discovered as he was leaving the National Guard at 22, he went straight into television, an episode of The Hardy Boys. More TV came along as well as feature films in which he generally showed off his hunky good looks and physique. His first film in 1967 was a Western, The Bandits, made in Mexico. Journey to Shiloh saw him working with James Caan, Michael Sarrazin, Don Stroud and Harrison Ford, five years before Ford clicked in American Graffiti. He appeared with John Wayne in The Undefeated, and with Robert Mitchum in Going Home in which Vincent played a disturbed orphan. Michael Winner pitched him against Charles Bronson in The Mechanic, and he played the title role in The World’s Greatest Athlete as a Tarzan figure from Africa. Being well-built for physical roles, Vincent nevertheless could handle romance as he did in Buster and Billie, Daniel Petrie’s sensitive tale of his relationship with an unpopular girl. Bite the Bullet was Richard Brooks’s Western with Gene Hackman, James Coburn and Candice Bergen, and in Baby Blue Marine Vincent played a failed marine who is fêted as a war hero on returning home. In titles like Shadow of the Hawk, Vigilante Force, Damnation Alley and Hard Country you can guess the content, but with Big Wednesday, John Milius’s film about California’s surfing community, its rarity value proved popular. More actioners including Hal Needham’s Hooper with Burt Reynolds and Sally Field led eventually to Vincent’s most successful TV work, The Winds of War with Robert Mitchum, and Airwolf, all fifty-five episodes which defined Vincent’s career for ever, as he played Stringfellow Hawke, pilot of a battle helicopter. More minor action pics followed, very little of which we saw in the UK. Vincent’s last film was White Boy in 2002. His life thereafter took a turn for the worse. He had broken his neck in a car crash, was already an alcoholic and went into rehab for being drunk while on probation, was arrested for abusing his wife, sectioned for drug charges and later jailed for further offences. Finally, in 2012, he had part of his right leg amputated through an infection. A person of promise, Jan-Michael Vincent never really lived up to his early potential. He was married three times, with his first two marriages ending in divorce, and has one daughter, Amber Vincent, from his first marriage.

MICHAEL DARVELL