Mark Goddard, the actor best known for his role as Maj. Don West in the imaginative and popular 1960s science fiction series “Lost in Space,” died Tuesday at a hospice center at age 87 in Hingham, Massachusetts.
His son John said the cause was pulmonary fibrosis.
Major West was the pilot of a spaceship carrying a family of five, a stowaway and a robot in the distant future – 1997. En route to colonizing a planet in the Alpha Centauri system, their ship became seriously off course away. The cast was stuck in a different, inhospitable atmosphere, although fortunately the atmosphere was suitable for human life.
This set the stage for encounters with giant spiders, rock monsters, frog people, cyborg armies, space hippies, alien prisons, intergalactic beauty pageants and titanium shortages.
The show – created by Irwin Allen, a producer later known for popular disaster films such as “The Towering Inferno” – ran for three seasons (1965-68) on CBS. In theory, Major West was the romantic lead, a handsome single man in uniform, and the first season hinted at a budding romance between him and the family’s eldest child, Judy (Marta Kristen). But this subplot soon faded into the background.
For various reasons, including the fact that it was scheduled alongside the new comic book-like “Batman”, “Lost in Space” changed in the second and third seasons from a science fiction project to a cheesy series that was more comedy than adventure was.
Mr. Goddard’s character no longer had to build force fields, point his ray gun at rock-throwing giants, navigate rough new planetary terrain or fend off kidnappers from another dimension. It was more likely that he stayed behind while analyzing soil samples while Dr. Smith (Jonathan Harris), the blind saboteur, little Will (Billy Mumy) and the robot (Bob May, voiced by Dick Tufeld) were out and about and got into trouble with a new creature or machine.
The other regulars in the cast were Guy Williams and June Lockhart as the space-traveling parents and Angela Cartwright as their other daughter.
Don was always the character who gloated over Dr. Smith was the person who annoyed him the most and who sympathized with him the least. He could be both short-tempered and cold-hearted, but against his better judgement, he dutifully undertook a spacewalk to rescue Smith from the clutches of a seductive alien creature. If it had been up to him alone, he admitted, he would have Dr. Leaving Smith floating through space for eternity.
Mr. Goddard was reluctant to take on the role of Major West because he was not a fan of science fiction. In his 2008 memoir “To Space and Back,” he described his space uniform, his wardrobe for the show, as “silver lamé pajamas and my nice silver ski boots.”
Charles Harvey Goddard was born on July 24, 1936 in Lowell, Massachusetts. He was the youngest of five children born to Clarence and Ruth (Delaronde) Goddard. He grew up in nearby Scituate, Massachusetts, where his father owned and managed the local five-and-ten dime store.
Chuck, as he was known then, attended Holy Cross College in Worcester, about 70 miles away, with no particular professional ambitions. He became interested in acting after appearing in a college play, George M. Cohan’s “Seven Keys to Baldpate.” In 1957, halfway through his junior year, he transferred to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York. Two years later he moved to Los Angeles.
He made his screen debut in 1959 in a television film that was intended as a pilot for “The Joan Crawford Show.” (The series never happened.) At the suggestion of Chuck Connors, the star of “The Rifleman,” a Western series in which Mr. Goddard guest-starred, he changed his first name to Mark — no need to have two Chucks in the same Series to have credits of the show.
After just three weeks in the city, Mr. Goddard was cast in a television series. He played Cully, the young deputy sheriff in the short-lived Western Johnny Ringo (1959-60). Cully, a former carnival sniper, was brave enough to face armed robbers and bloodthirsty bounty hunters, but sensitive enough to be traumatized after killing a man for the first time.
“The whole time I was handling guns and not knowing what they did,” Cully said after shooting a man in a saloon in self-defense.
When “Johnny Ringo” ended after a year, Mr. Goddard joined the second season of “The Detectives,” a crime drama starring Robert Taylor. Mr. Goddard’s character, Sgt. Chris Ballard, was described by The New York Times as “a brash but efficient young police lieutenant.”
“The Detectives” ended in 1962. Mr. Goddard’s next series, “Many Happy Returns” (1964-65), a comedy starring Elinor Donahue, was also canceled after just a year. Then came “Lost in Space.”
When the show ended in 1968, he had difficulty finding work as an actor. He worked as an actor’s agent for a while and then had the opportunity to make his Broadway debut in 1977 in “The Act” with Liza Minnelli. Richard Eder of The Times said the production was “a first-class cabaret show”. ” but not really theater. It ran on star power alone for eight months.
Mr. Goddard then appeared in the horror film “Blue Sunshine” (1978) and made guest appearances in several series. He entered the world of soap operas in the 1980s, appearing briefly on “One Life to Live” in 1981 and on “General Hospital” in 1985 and 1986.
Mr. Goddard was married three times. His marriage to Marcia Rogers (1960-68), a press agent at the time, ended in divorce, as did his marriage to the actress Susan Anspach (1970-78). In 1994 he married Evelyn Pezzulich, an English professor who survives him. In addition to his son John from this marriage, his survivors include two children from his marriage to Mrs. Rogers, Melissa and Michael Goddard; two stepchildren from his marriage to Susan Anspach, Caleb and Catherine Goddard; two sisters, June Merrill and Patricia Panet-Raymond; and several grandchildren.
In his 50s, Mr. Goddard went home again. After 30 years, he returned to college and earned a bachelor’s degree in communications and a master’s degree in education from Bridgewater State College in Massachusetts. In 1991, he became a special education teacher in Middleborough, Massachusetts.
Even after he started teaching, he occasionally took jobs as a screenwriter. He had a cameo appearance in the film version of “Lost in Space” (1998) and appeared in the drama films “Overnight Sensation” (2000) and “Soupernatural” (2010). But he no longer saw himself as an actor.
“I had a wonderful life as an actor,” he told The Houston Chronicle in 1997. “But I didn’t want to sit around in Hollywood, some kind of semi-star looking for his next job.”
Bernard Mokam contributed reporting.