No One From ‘The Rifleman’ Main Cast Is Still Alive Today, Including The Boy Who Played Mark McCain

Before a single word was spoken, every episode of The Rifleman opened with a man walking down a dusty North Fork street and emptying a Winchester in a blur of shots. That rifle had a large ring lever and a set screw that tripped the trigger every time Lucas McCain worked the lever, which let Chuck Connors fire off the whole magazine in under six seconds. Kids all over America tried to spin-cock their cap guns for years afterward.

ABC first aired the show on September 30, 1958, and over 168 episodes it told something rare for a 1950s Western: a story about a widowed father raising his son on a New Mexico ranch. Sam Peckinpah wrote the pilot, “The Sharpshooter,” which first aired on Dick Powell’s Zane Grey Theatre. The series ran until April 1963. Here is what became of the people of North Fork, in the order we lost them, ending with the boy who was the heart of it all.

Is Hope Summers Still Alive?

Every frontier town needs a busybody with a big heart, and North Fork had Hattie Denton, played by Hope Summers. Born in Mattoon, Illinois, Summers was one of those faces you knew from everywhere. On The Andy Griffith Show she was Clara Edwards, Aunt Bee’s best friend and occasional rival at the county fair, and she played one of the coven neighbors in Rosemary’s Baby in 1968.

She also had a voice millions of Americans heard without knowing it. For nearly 20 years, as MeTV has reported, she was the voice of Mrs. Butterworth in the syrup commercials. Summers died in Woodland Hills, California, on June 22, 1979, according to her Wikipedia biography and Find a Grave.

Is Paul Fix Still Alive?

Marshal Micah Torrance was the town lawman who had lost his nerve to the bottle until Lucas helped him find it again, and Paul Fix played him with a quiet, weathered dignity. Born March 13, 1901, in Dobbs Ferry, New York, Fix was one of John Wayne’s oldest friends in Hollywood. He coached the young Wayne on acting in the 1930s and turned up in film after film beside him.

After North Fork, Fix played the ship’s doctor in the second Star Trek pilot and the judge in To Kill a Mockingbird. His daughter Marilyn married another Western favorite, Harry Carey Jr. Fix died of kidney failure in Los Angeles on October 14, 1983, at 82, according to The New York Times.

Is Chuck Connors Still Alive?

Before he was Lucas McCain, Kevin Joseph “Chuck” Connors was a professional athlete, and not a minor one. Born April 10, 1921, in Brooklyn, he played basketball for the Boston Celtics in 1946 and 1947, where he is reported to be the first pro player to shatter a backboard. Then he played Major League Baseball for the Brooklyn Dodgers and the Chicago Cubs, which makes him one of only 13 athletes to play in both the NBA and the majors. Our story on the small Disney role that won him The Rifleman tells how he got the part after being told he didn’t have a chance.

He was famously modest about his acting. “Have you ever seen a 6-foot-4-inch, 225-pound pile of corn? Well, every time you view The Rifleman you see it in me,” he told The Salt Lake Tribune in 1961, as MeTV recounted. He went on to Branded, Soylent Green and an Emmy-nominated turn as the slave owner Tom Moore in Roots, and his most surprising fan was Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, who met him at Richard Nixon’s San Clemente home in 1973 and hugged him so hard he lifted him off the ground, as UPI reported. Connors died of lung cancer at Cedars-Sinai on November 10, 1992, at 71, as UPI and the Times reported.

Is Bill Quinn Still Alive?

If Lucas needed to know who had just ridden into town, Sweeney the bartender usually knew first. Bill Quinn, born May 6, 1912, in New York City, poured drinks in 38 episodes and then spent decades as one of TV’s most dependable character actors.

Viewers of a later generation knew him as the blind, gentlemanly Mr. Van Ranseleer on Archie Bunker’s Place, and he played Dr. McCoy’s father in Star Trek V. In real life, he was also Bob Newhart’s father-in-law. Quinn died of natural causes in Camarillo, California, on April 29, 1994, at 81, according to UPI and the Associated Press.

Is Joan Taylor Still Alive?

For two seasons, Lucas had a gentle love interest in Milly Scott, the storekeeper played by Joan Taylor. Born Rose Marie Emma on August 18, 1929, in Geneva, Illinois, Taylor had already fought off alien invaders in Earth vs. the Flying Saucers and 20 Million Miles to Earth before she came to North Fork.

When she left the show, she left acting too, to raise her children with her husband, Leonard Freeman, who went on to create Hawaii Five-O. After he died in 1974, she took over as the businesswoman behind the series under the name Rose Freeman. She died of natural causes in Santa Monica on March 4, 2012, at 82, as Variety and The Hollywood Reporter reported.

Is Patricia Blair Still Alive?

When Milly left, a sharper, more independent woman arrived. Patricia Blair played hotel owner Lou Mallory, and she gave Lucas as good as she got. Born Patsy Lou Blake on January 15, 1933, in Fort Worth, Texas, Blair went straight from North Fork to the Kentucky frontier.

She played Rebecca Boone opposite Fess Parker on Daniel Boone for all six seasons, from 1964 to 1970, and later produced trade shows in New York and New Jersey. She died of breast cancer at her home in North Wildwood, New Jersey, on September 9, 2013, at 80, as The New York Times and Legacy.com reported.

Is Johnny Crawford Still Alive?

Johnny Crawford was 12 when he became Mark McCain, and he was already a show business veteran as one of the original Mouseketeers in 1955. Born March 26, 1946, in Los Angeles, he earned an Emmy nomination at 13 for playing Mark, and in 1962 his song “Cindy’s Birthday” reached No. 8 on the Billboard Hot 100. He served two years in the Army making training films, and from 1992 he led his own vintage dance band, the Johnny Crawford Dance Orchestra.

He never stopped talking about the man who played his father. “When we got together to do The Rifleman, we just hit it off,” he told Cowboys & Indians. “He was unique. I’ll never meet anybody else like him again.” Crawford was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in 2019, and after battling COVID-19 and pneumonia, he died on April 29, 2021, at 75, his wife, Charlotte, said, as the Boston Globe and The New York Times reported. His feelings about Connors had never changed. “I still miss him,” he said. “The strongest thing about it has always been that father-son relationship.”