Hope this year is better than last

[Mr. Mike]

2021 was not a good year, we lost:

Doug Mossman
Al Harrington
Ed Asner
Gavin MacLeod

plus

Jean Hale
Jessica Walter
Johnny Crawford
Hal Holbrook (reboot, probably the oldest actor ever on any version of the show)

[Bobbi]

Don't forget, we lost William Smith too. Sharon Farrell is the last surviving member of the Five-O team.

[Todd]

I guess by default it can't be worse, regarding Classic Five-O losses, since all but one of the main characters are already gone.

It has been 53 1/2 years since Five-O started, and none of the characters except Danny Williams were young, so it was inevitable that almost everyone would be gone by now.

The most surprising thing to me was that George Gaines, who played a grandfather on Five-O in1970, lived until 2016!

[Mr. Mike]

William Smith was on the piece of paper where I wrote the actors who passed away last year but I didn't have this paper handy when I made the posting, so I (perhaps subconsciously) forgot about him (really).

The choice of Smith to appear on Five-O was surely one of the great casting blunders of all time. Smith typically appeared as a villain or a biker in his screen and TV roles. Maybe he wanted a chance at a "respectable" part?

Smith referred briefly to his H50 role in an interview published in Shock Cinema magazine:

https://archive.org/details/ShockCin...ge/n5/mode/2up

Sharon Farrell, in an interview on my site (http://fiveohomepage.com/farrell-interview.htm) had this to say:

"They brought in me and Bill [Smith] -- see, it came to a point where -- for Jack Lord to do the last year, he held out from the studios. He wanted to direct, and he wanted to do another pilot. He wanted to be in control of “Hawaii Five-O”. He told me he wanted to put me and Bill Smith -- we were going to run Hawaii Five-O. We were going to take over Hawaii Five-O. He was starting a new series -- he was some kind of captain -- I don’t know that much about it. But what they did was, they said “Oh, yah, yah, yah” to him, and they let him do the pilot -- it was so important to them to have him do that last year -- that they gave in to him, but they didn’t buy anything that he did. They didn’t buy the show that he did. But they made him finish up “Hawaii Five-O."