'Lost In Space' Actor, Mark Goddard, Dead At 87
Image Source: The Enterprise
Actor Mark Goddard died of pulmonary fibrosis on October 10 in Hingham, Massachusetts, at the age of 87. Born as Charles Harvey Goddard, he changed his name shortly after coming to Hollywood and landing his first role in the CBS Four Star Television series Johnny Ringo in 1959.
Goddard is probably best known for his role as Major Don West in the CBS series Lost in Space (1965 - 1968). The project, created and produced by Irwin Allen, didn't initially raise his interest, due to the subject matter of a seemingly cheesy sci-fi adventure, to which his agent answered: "Well, listen, you just do it and don’t worry about it. Take the money. Because nobody’s gonna see it and it’ll never sell.”
RELATED:
Image Source: Los Angeles Times
A slight misconception, as Lost in Space ran for 83 episodes and three seasons. But Goddard also had other hesitations aside from appearing in a sci-fi show whose breakout character was the robot. As he wrote in his 2008 autobiography To Space and Back, when he saw himself in his tight, shiny spacesuit for the first time, he "took a deep breath, took a second look at the image of a wrapped-aluminum baked potato and said to myself, ‘How the hell did this happen?’”
But even later, he was often uncomfortable with the atmosphere on set: “There was tension with the cinematographer, there was tension with the writers coming down, there was always something going on. … You know what they say, the ‘fish stinks from the head?’". He blamed Allen's rather cold and perfectionistic attitude that permeated down to the cast and crew for these tensions. But despite all this, he earned $ 1,170 per week by the end of the series. Goddard had a cameo appearance as a general and superior officer to his former character Don West, in the 1998 feature-film adaptation of Lost in Space but he was absent from the 2018 TV series.
Aside from Lost in Space, Goddard had a recurring role as Sgt. Chris Ballard in the ABC/NBC series The Detectives (1960-1962) and guest appeared in shows like The Fugitive, The Fall Guy, and Parry Mason, to name only a few. Later in his life, he received his master's degree in education 30 years after starting his studies and became a special education teacher for acting in Middleboro, Massachusetts. Goddard was married three times and had three children.
READ NEXT:
Latest News
Featured
