Those first pounding drums are still enough to put most of us back on the couch. A wave curls over, the camera swoops toward a lone figure on a penthouse balcony, and Jack Lord turns around as Morton Stevens’s theme kicks in. The Ventures took that theme to No. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1969. Then, at the end of the hour, came the line everybody’s uncle tried at least once: “Book ’em, Danno.”
Hawaii Five-O ran on CBS from September 20, 1968, to April 5, 1980, for 12 seasons and 282 episodes, and it brought real Honolulu streets and island faces into mainland living rooms every week. Many of its regulars were locals who had been cops, teachers and football stars before anyone handed them a badge on camera. The Hawaii Five-O cast has now passed on, and the stories of what they did after the cameras stopped are as good as anything the writers came up with.
Is Jack Lord still alive?
Steve McGarrett was the whole show, and Jack Lord made sure of it. Born John Joseph Patrick Ryan in Brooklyn on December 30, 1920, he had wanted to be a painter long before he wanted to act, and he sold his first work to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1941. He stayed with McGarrett for all 12 seasons, and after Five-O ended he made only one more try at television, directing and appearing in a 1980 pilot M Station: Hawaii, which CBS didn’t pick up.
He and his wife Marie then stayed in their Kahala home and largely out of sight. Jack Lord died there of congestive heart failure on January 21, 1998, at 77. The Honolulu Star-Bulletin reported that he had been in seclusion for years with what friends believed was Alzheimer’s disease, and Kam Fong told the paper, “Marie would allow no one to visit, not even MacArthur.” Marie’s statement that night began, “Jack loved acting and he loved these islands.” When she died in 2005, the couple’s estate, which the Honolulu Advertiser put at $40 million, went to Hawaiian charities. Lord’s last scene as McGarrett had come 18 years earlier, when he finally put away his oldest enemy.
Is Khigh Dhiegh still alive?
That enemy was Wo Fat, the smiling Chinese agent who slipped out of McGarrett’s grasp from the 1968 pilot until the series finale, “Woe to Wo Fat,” when he was finally locked up. Khigh Dhiegh was born Kenneth Dickerson in Spring Lake, New Jersey, and he changed his name legally in 1962, the same year he played the brainwashing expert Dr. Yen Lo in The Manchurian Candidate.
Off screen he became a serious student of Taoism. He founded the Taoist Sanctuary in Hollywood in 1971 and wrote books on Taoism. Khigh Dhiegh died of kidney and heart failure on October 25, 1991, at a hospital in Mesa, Arizona. The Washington Post gave his age as 81, although records disagree on the year he was born. The man who sent McGarrett his orders had a far gentler path into the show.
Is Richard Denning still alive?
Richard Denning had already had a full career by 1968. He starred as Jerry North in Mr. and Mrs. North, fought the Gill-man in Creature from the Black Lagoon and played the private eye Michael Shayne on NBC. He was semi-retired on Maui when producer Leonard Freeman came calling with the part of the governor, Paul Jameson.
Freeman got him to say yes by promising five-hour workdays and a four-day week. He played the governor through the last season and never took another role. Richard Denning died on October 11, 1998, in Escondido, California, at 84. One of McGarrett’s men had once filled stadiums of his own.
Is Herman Wedemeyer still alive?
Before he was Sergeant Duke Lukela, Herman Wedemeyer was a Honolulu-born halfback who became a consensus All-American at Saint Mary’s College in California in 1945. He played pro ball for the Los Angeles Dons and the Baltimore Colts, then came home and went into politics, winning a seat on the Honolulu City Council in 1968 and later serving in the Hawaii House of Representatives.
He joined Five-O in 1971 and stayed until the end, working his way from uniformed sergeant to detective. Herman Wedemeyer died on January 25, 1999, at the Queen’s Medical Center in Honolulu, at 74. The cause was not released at the time. The next man on our list had seen more heartbreak before he ever stepped in front of a camera than most people see in a lifetime.
Is Kam Fong still alive?
Kam Fong Chun grew up poor in Kalihi and was working at the Pearl Harbor shipyard when the attack came in 1941. Three years later, on June 8, 1944, two military bombers collided over Honolulu and crashed into his neighborhood, killing his wife, Esther, and their two children. He joined the Honolulu Police Department soon after, and the Star-Bulletin later wrote that he did it hoping to die. Instead he spent the better part of two decades on the force and slowly built a new life.
Leonard Freeman wanted him for Chin Ho Kelly from the start, and he played the steady detective for ten seasons until Chin Ho was killed in the 1978 season finale. “He was a very strict task master,” Fong told the Honolulu Star-Bulletin about Lord. “I learned a lot from him, by watching him.” Kam Fong died of lung cancer on October 18, 2002, at 84. His son Dennis told the paper, “He never understood how a poor barefoot boy from Kalihi could grow up to walk the sound stages of Hollywood.” The big detective at his side in those early years took a very different road.
Is Zulu still alive?
Gilbert Francis Lani Damian Kauhi got the nickname Zulu from his high school classmates in Hilo, and by the late 1960s he was a radio disc jockey on KHVH and a stage comedian. As Kono Kalakaua he was the big, warm presence on the original team, and the shot of him breaking down a door in the opening titles stayed with viewers for decades.
He left after four seasons, and the reason has never been settled on the record. He went back to music, leading a group called Zulu and the Seven Sons of Hawaii, performed as “Zoulou,” and returned as Kono for the unaired 1997 revival pilot. Zulu died of complications from diabetes on May 3, 2004, at Hilo Medical Center, at 66. Two familiar faces from the Five-O office had their own island connections.
Are Peggy Ryan and Harry Endo still alive?
Peggy Ryan was a Hollywood tap dancer first, partnering Donald O’Connor in a string of wartime Universal musicals. She married Honolulu newspaper columnist Eddie Sherman in 1958, and from 1969 to 1976 she played McGarrett’s secretary Jenny Sherman, the character sharing her husband’s last name. She later moved to Las Vegas and taught tap dancing there. Peggy Ryan died on October 30, 2004, at Sunrise Hospital in Las Vegas, at 80, after complications from strokes, according to the Las Vegas Sun.
Harry Endo was a Denver-born bank employee in Honolulu when Freeman spotted him in a commercial he had made for the bank. That led to Che Fong, the lab man, a part he played in more than 100 episodes. Harry Endo died after a stroke on January 9, 2009, at a hospital in Brooklyn, New York, at 86. A year later Five-O lost the man McGarrett had been talking to all those years.
Is James MacArthur still alive?
James MacArthur was born on December 8, 1937, and adopted by playwright Charles MacArthur and actress Helen Hayes, the woman Broadway called its First Lady. He played Danny “Danno” Williams for 11 seasons and left in 1979, a year before the show ended, saying later, “It was just time.” Lord saw it differently. “I think that he thought we would be cancelled,” he told the Kalamazoo Gazette, as MeTV recounted.
MacArthur kept busy with guest roles on Murder, She Wrote and The Love Boat and with stage tours, and he was set for a cameo in the 2010 remake. James MacArthur died on October 28, 2010, in Jacksonville, Florida, at 72, of natural causes according to the Associated Press. Honolulu singer Jimmy Borges told Hawaii News Now, “He was a mensch, he was a real good guy.” Behind the stars, the show leaned on local talent that stayed for years.
Are Glenn Cannon and Doug Mossman still alive?
Glenn Cannon joined the University of Hawaii theatre faculty in 1968 and played Attorney General John Manicote in 33 episodes. He died at Straub Hospital in Honolulu on April 20, 2013, at 80, and the governor declared May 25, 2013, Glenn Cannon Day.
Doug Mossman was a Kamehameha Schools graduate and Korean War veteran who had played Moke on Hawaiian Eye in the early 1960s. He became a series regular on Five-O in 1974 as Detective Frank Kamana. Mossman died of natural causes in Ewa on May 18, 2021, at 88. His son Trey told the Honolulu Star-Advertiser, “There were not many people working in Hollywood in those days that came from where he came from.” Four months later the island lost another son who had made it big.
Is Al Harrington still alive?
Al Harrington was born Tausau Ta’a in Pago Pago, American Samoa, on December 12, 1935. He was a Punahou football star and a Stanford graduate who taught history before he became “The South Pacific Man,” headlining a Polynesian revue at the Hilton Hawaiian Village. He played Detective Ben Kokua from 1972, after Zulu’s exit, and his popularity may have worked against him. “Jack Lord is very definitely the star of Five-O,” he told the Fort Lauderdale News, “and there were feelings when Ben became so popular.”
Decades later he came back as Mamo Kahike on the CBS reboot, and in 2010 he told the Deseret News, “The original show was really good for Hawaii.” Al Harrington died in Honolulu on September 21, 2021, at 85, after a massive stroke. The two men who joined the team for its last season had come from very different worlds.
Are William Smith and Moe Keale still alive?
When MacArthur left, the producers brought in William Smith as Detective James “Kimo” Carew. Smith was a bodybuilder and world arm-wrestling champion, already known as Joe Riley on Laredo and as Falconetti in Rich Man, Poor Man. After Five-O he slugged it out with Clint Eastwood in Any Which Way You Can, a brawl he later called “one of the longest two-man fights ever done on film without doubles.” William Smith died on July 5, 2021, in Woodland Hills, California, at 88. His wife did not give a cause.
Moe Keale, who played Truck Kealoha that same final season, was a ukulele player with the Sons of Hawaii and the uncle and early musical influence of Israel Kamakawiwo’ole. He died of a heart attack in Honolulu on April 15, 2002, at 62. That left one more newcomer from 1979, and she outlived the entire team.
Is Sharon Farrell still alive?
Sharon Farrell was born Sharon Lee Forsmoe in Sioux City, Iowa, on December 24, 1940, and trained as a ballet dancer before films like The Reivers with Steve McQueen and Marlowe with James Garner. Lord called her himself to play Lori Wilson in the final season, and she later said he wanted the name pronounced “Lo-REE. Like Marie!” No one on set ever said it that way. The job was not a happy one. “He was just a nightmare,” she said of Lord in a 1990s interview later quoted by TheWrap.
She had already starred in the 1974 horror hit It’s Alive, and later she spent six years as Florence Webster on The Young and the Restless in the 1990s. Sharon Farrell died on May 15, 2023, at 82, and the news didn’t come out until August, when her sister shared it on Facebook and said she didn’t know the cause. She was the last of them. The newest detective on the team, the one who arrived with only 13 episodes left on the clock, turned out to be the last one to leave the office.
