The delicious irony of The Six Million Dollar Man was that Lee Majors, all pasty jowls and bad denim, looked anything but. What's the point of bounding over skyscrapers and out-legging speeding trucks if you can't carry it off with a modicum of panache? Majors played a distinctly scruffy superhero, one apparently assembled from spare scrap, used batteries and charity shop cast-offs. Six million dollars? Sixty quid more like.
Born in 1939, Majors grew up in backwater Middleboro, Kentucky. Aged 11, he stumbled across an old newspaper clipping that revealed his "parents" were actually his aunt and uncle. His real mother and father had died in separate tragedies before he was three. Stunned, he resolved to make his adoptive family proud. One way or another, Majors was going to become famous.
He secured an athletics scholarship to Eastern Kentucky State College but a freak back injury put paid to his sporting ambitions. Refusing to surrender his dream, Majors turned to acting. Uprooting a young wife and son, he moved to Los Angeles, where he worked as a park attendant.
Majors was not prepared to wait for fame to seek him out. Instead, he fast-talked his way into the office of Hollywood agent Dick Clayton (the man who, a decade earlier, had discovered James Dean). Wowed by the young Midwesterner's chutzpah, Clayton secured Majors a berth on MGM's prestigious acting course.
Despite the collapse of his marriage soon afterwards, things were finally looking up. Competing against 400 other hopefuls - many of them TV veterans - Majors banked a lead role in a new western, The Big Valley. The show scored huge ratings, and suddenly the quiet boy from Kentucky was a star. In 1969, he graduated to the courtroom drama Owen Wilson. The series garnered impressive notices and proved he could carry a production on his own.
But Majors felt constricted by its studio-bound format and hungered for more robust material. He got his wish in 1974 when ABC commissioned three TV movies chronicling the adventures of "bionic" secret agent Steve Austin.
The features were hugely successful, prompting the studio to green-light a follow-up show. Major's on-screen immortality was assured. A second marriage, to Charlie's Angels star Farah Fawcett, sent his profile into high orbit.
Although he never gave up hope, Major's film career remained earthbound. Poor judgment didn't help. He turned down a part in Midnight Cowboy - the the role went to unknown Jon Voight. In later years, he laboured in forgettable TV flicks and the lamentable Fall Guy in the early 1980s. Since then, he has only popped up on kitsch chat shows.I blame the denim.
Edward Power
Website: www.leemajors.co.uk