Martin Milner

Martin Sam Milner was an American actor and radio host born on December 28, 1931, in Detroit, Michigan. His mother, Mildred, had worked as a dancer in the Paramount Theater circuit, and his father, Sam Gordon Milner, a Polish-Jewish immigrant, worked in construction before becoming a film distributor. The family relocated frequently during Milner's childhood, eventually settling in Seattle, Washington, where he was nine years old. It was there that he first pursued acting, beginning in school productions and continuing with a children's theater group at the Cornish Playhouse. As a teenager, he moved with his family to Los Angeles, where his parents arranged both an acting coach and an agent for him.

Milner made his film debut in 1947 at the age of fourteen in the Warner Bros. production Life with Father, in which he played the middle son of William Powell's character. Shortly after completing the film, he contracted polio but recovered within a year. Following his recovery, he appeared in small roles in additional films before graduating from North Hollywood High School in 1949, immediately after which he secured a minor part in Sands of Iwo Jima alongside John Wayne. He enrolled at the University of Southern California to study theater but left after a year in 1950 to focus on his acting career. That same year he made his first television appearance on The Lone Ranger and began a recurring role as Drexel Potter on The Stu Erwin Show.

Throughout the 1950s, Milner accumulated credits in both film and television. His film work during this period included Operation Pacific (1951) with John Wayne, The Long Gray Line (1955), Mister Roberts (1955) with William Powell, Henry Fonda, James Cagney, and Jack Lemmon, Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1957), Sweet Smell of Success (1957), Marjorie Morningstar (1958), and Compulsion (1959). On the set of Halls of Montezuma in 1950, he met actor Jack Webb and subsequently took on intermittent work on Webb's radio series Dragnet, eventually appearing in six episodes of the television version between 1952 and 1955. From 1953 to 1958, he held a recurring role on The Life of Riley, and he made guest appearances on numerous other television programs during the same period.

In 1952, Milner entered the United States Army and was assigned to Special Services at Fort Ord on California's Monterey Bay Peninsula, where he directed training films and performed in a touring entertainment unit for soldiers. During his service, he continued working with Webb on the Dragnet radio series on weekends, playing Officer Bill Lockwood among other characters. Fellow soldiers at Fort Ord included David Janssen, Clint Eastwood, and Richard Long, and it was Janssen who encouraged Milner to continue pursuing acting after his discharge.

In 1960, Milner was cast as Tod Stiles in the CBS television series Route 66, created by Stirling Silliphant. The show followed two young men traveling the United States in a Chevrolet Corvette, with Milner's character having been left penniless following his father's death. George Maharis played his companion Buz Murdock for the first portion of the series before being replaced by Glenn Corbett in the third season. Route 66 ran until 1964, during which time Milner spent nearly four years traveling the country for location shoots, sometimes accompanied by his wife and children. He later appeared in the 1967 film Valley of the Dolls, based on Jacqueline Susann's novel.

Milner's Broadway career spanned from 1967 to 1986. His stage credits include The Ninety Day Mistress, a short-lived comedy that opened in 1967, and Doubles. His Broadway debut in The Ninety Day Mistress coincided with the same year he appeared in Valley of the Dolls.

In 1968, drawing on his long working relationship with Jack Webb, Milner was cast as Officer Pete Malloy, a seven-year LAPD veteran, in the NBC police drama Adam-12. Webb selected Milner in part because of his on-camera driving experience from Route 66. Kent McCord played Malloy's rookie partner, Officer Jim Reed. The series, grounded in actual Los Angeles Police Department procedures and cases, ran until 1975. During and after Adam-12's run, Milner guest-starred in three episodes of Emergency!, including the pilot movie The Wedsworth-Townsend Act. In 1971, he also portrayed the murder victim in the premiere episode of Columbo, titled "Murder by the Book."

Following Adam-12, Milner starred as Karl Robinson in the television series The Swiss Family Robinson (1975–1976), produced by Irwin Allen. His subsequent work consisted largely of guest appearances on programs including MacGyver, Airwolf, Murder She Wrote, and RoboCop: The Series. In 1983, he hosted a morning radio program on AM 600 KOGO in San Diego. In 1990, he reunited with Kent McCord in the cable film Nashville Beat on The Nashville Network, in which McCord played an LAPD detective working alongside Milner's character in Nashville, Tennessee. In 1992, he appeared in five episodes of ABC's Life Goes On. In 1998, Milner participated in the documentary Route 66: Return to the Road with Martin Milner, retracing the original series' path by driving a 1961 Corvette from Chicago to Santa Monica. After retiring from acting, he co-hosted a fishing-focused radio program called Let's Talk Hook-Up on San Diego-area sports station XETRA AM 690.

In May 1956, Milner met singer and actress Judith Bess Jones at a Hollywood dinner party, and the two married on February 23, 1957, in Waukegan, Illinois. They had four children together. In February 2003, their eldest daughter Amy, who had appeared in an episode of Adam-12, was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia and died in December 2004. Milner died of heart failure on September 6, 2015, at his home in Carlsbad, California, at the age of 83.