Actor Robert Urich dies from cancer at age 55

By Robert Bianco, USA TODAY

Robert Urich was always more popular than his shows. The good-looking, good-natured actor, who died Tuesday morning of cancer, was one of the signature TV stars of the '70s and '80s — a man whom audiences instinctively took to as a not-too-threatening nice guy. Most of his series failed, and even those that succeeded had relatively short runs, but the failure always seemed to be a rejection of the show, not of the star.

Robert Urich had battled cancer on and off since 1996.

Indeed, there was a time when no season seemed complete if Urich was not playing a detective — his most familiar TV role. Born in Toronto, Ohio, in 1946, the 6-foot-2 actor began his detective run in 1978 as Dan Tanna on ABC's Vega$. It wasn't his first show (that was the 1973 sitcom version of Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice), but Vega$ was his biggest hit, and it cemented his image as a wise-cracking ladies' man who could fight, but would rather not.

When Vega$ ended in 1981, he returned the following season as an ex-CIA agent in the short-lived NBC series Gavilan. Then, in 1985, he began a three-year run in what most would consider his best series, the ABC version of Spenser: For Hire. Though the show was never a huge ratings success, and was not particularly popular with devoted fans of the books, it gave Urich his first real opportunity to prove he could act as well as entertain.

He got that chance again in what was almost certainly his best role: the doomed ne'er-do-well Jake Spoon in the classic miniseries Lonesome Dove. Playing a well-liked but none-too-bright drifter whose stupidity costs him his life, Urich gave Dove some of its most poignant moments.

While Urich never stopped working on television, he never again had a hit to match Dove or Vega$. Aside from his well-reviewed 1990 sitcom American Dreamer, most of the shows were ill-chosen, from the legendarily awful Faye Dunaway sitcom vehicle It Had to Be You to the tired revival of The Love Boat. His final series was the sitcom Emeril, which had a brief run this fall on NBC.

But that's not how we'll remember him. We'll remember him as Dan Tanna, or Spenser.

And I bet when we do, we'll smile.