We sat down and read it for the first time and I thanked God under my breath, because they were all so good. And my leading ladies are both exceptional. I mean, everybody in the play. I could just go on all night about them.
— Gavin MacLeod
I checked myself out in that funeral parlour scene. I saw myself laughing, because there was a shot of Ed and I together and Mary was right in back of us. My head turned from the camera and I saw myself laughing, because Mary was absolutely brilliant in that thing.
We were making new ones the second year. We were in syndication the second year. So we were on Saturday nights, prime time, every morning, and then they put it on Sunday evenings too. So it was all over the place.
I always think that I love doing what I'm doing at the moment. The past is over. I can't go play one of those characters again. But I can play this and I can continue to grow in what I'm doing at the moment and that's really what I'm thinking about now.
We went out for six weeks a year. We first started in Mexico and we did that for so many years that we finally said we've got to explore and start going globally. And then we started going all over the world.
It was tough for him in that newsroom with Ted Baxter getting all the glory and this poor guy doing all the work. Murray worried so much he worried his hair off!
But the character was so successful, that first one, that they wrote him again and he came in right at the end of the first year in a show called THE BOX. I was up for the Emmy for that one too.
Also, now as a result of that show being on, the cruise industry is just growing all over the place. Princess Cruises, who I now represent, is the fastest growning cruise line in the world.
This is a group playing together and that's the only way, I feel, this play can be successful and moving. I am so lucky to have the people that are in it. When I came here I didn't know who was going to be in the play.
You know, you have to put bread on the table. So you thank God you got the job.
I'm just there to do interviews and stuff, because we have about 40 media people there, so it's a very, very busy week. But that's the only time. I did marry, I think on one show, about 25 couples in Acapulco Bay once, but that was all just for kicks.
I just love the hours of the theatre, I love the way it operates. I always say that when you're doing a play it's like getting a shot of B12, and when you do television for a long series you need a shot of B12.
It all depended on the cut. Some of them were really on the ship. Some were really on the set. Like if they had the stars for a week, the stars coming off, that was usually on the set, except if we were on location for that particular show.
I haven't killed anyone on television in years and years. Must have been twenty something years.
I went over to shoot for six days. It turned out to be ten days, very nicely so. A little money.
We had to be very careful on our best behaviour when we went to these other countries. And then I made a living, I had a chance to support my wife and my kids. It was a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful program from that point of view.
This is a group effort. This is group theatre. This is no big star turn. You could do things with it to do that but it would just be out of kilter. This is one reason I like this play. This is a unit.
Somebody did an article in one of the newspapers saying that at that time I had the most visibility of any actor around. Kind of nice, you know, when that thing was happening.
There are a lot of new opportunities that are poking their head up in my future. I've been very fortunate that way, but for right now, what I like is what I'm doing.
It's very trying on a marriage when you're doing a one hour show, week after week after week. You don't have enough time for people that maybe you should have top priority.
We used two Princess Cruise ships. The Island Princess and The Pacific Princess. They were identical ships.
I've played heavies for years and years and years. I was bald. I came to Hollywood. I did a play about junk. I was a pusher, so I played pushers for years and years and years. I did war movies and things like that.
We have nine ships and in the next two years will have ten, eleven and twelve. So things are going very nicely and all because of that program that people thought was mindless and so forth.
That's one of the reasons I wanted to be an actor, to be like them. And there they were at my table, all talking about how nervous they were, about the lines, and so forth. No matter how big you get, you still have the same kinds of anxieties and so forth.
