The handsome actor became an icon to American youth on the hit 1960s TV series.
George Maharis, a stage-trained actor with rough-hewn good looks who became an icon to American youth in the 1960s as he cruised the country in a Corvette convertible in the hit television series “Route 66,” has died.
Maharis’ friend and caretaker Marc Bahan said in a Facebook post that he died Wednesday. Bahan told the Hollywood Reporter, which first reported Maharis’ death, that he died at his home in Beverly Hills, California, after contracting hepatitis. He was 94.
On “Route 66,” Maharis played Buz Murdock, a hardened survivor of New York City’s Hell’s Kitchen. His co-star Martin Milner, who died in 2015, was Tod Stiles, a young man raised in wealth who upon his father’s death was left with nothing but a shiny new Corvette.
The pair decided to travel the highway author John Steinbeck had dubbed “The Mother Road.” Each week brought a new adventure in a new city, and audiences tuned in in droves.
“Route 66” was the rare series at the time that was filmed on location, moving to new towns and cities for each new episode. It featured as guest stars a slew of future superstars, including Robert Redford, James Caan, Robert Duvall and Alan Alda, in some of their earliest roles.
The storied highway itself was as much a star of the show as Maharis and Milner. Since bypassed in favor of bigger, faster interstates, it stretched unbroken from Chicago to the Pacific Ocean and was venerated as a driving force behind the country’s 20th-century westward migration.
“Route 66” was said to have been inspired by Jack Kerouac’s novel “On the Road,” and it spawned its own hit song, an instrumental composed by Nelson Riddle.
