Remembering Peter Graves, 1926 - 2010

Long before the series of Tom Cruise Hollywood blockbuster movies, of which a fourth installment is anticipated to be released next year, there was the hit television show. Mission: Impossible aired on CBS from 1966 to 1973. Starring Peter Graves as James Phelps, a role for which he was awarded a Golden Globe in 1971, the show portrayed the covert actions of a top secret government agency tasked with preventing all manner of nefarious deeds under cloak of top secrecy.

Graves, who lent a solid and debonair presence to the small screen role as the leader of the secret band of agents, has passed away in Los Angeles at the age of 83.

In stark contrast to the tense and deadly serious tone of the Mission: Impossible series, Graves later found his way to the silver screen as bumbling airliner captain Clarence Oveur in the 1980 film Airplane! The film featured an ensemble cast that included the likes of Leslie Nielson, Lloyd Bridges and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and has, in the years since its release, been named as one of the funniest comedies ever made by the American Film Institute and Bravo.

In addition to peppering a young visitor to the cockpit with such strange and increasingly uncomfortable questions as "Joey, do you like movies about gladiators," Graves' character was at the center of a wide array of puns, malaprops and double entendres such in as the take-off scene shown below where the crew members can't keep track of their instructions and their own names at the same time.

Graves more recently appeared as host of A&E's Biography from 1994 until 2006, and leaves behind his wife Joan Endress who he married in 1950.

Photo by Angela George via Wikimedia Commons.