TV's 'Tarzan' Dies 5 Years After Wife's Murder

Ron Ely, the tall, musclebound actor who played the title character in the 1960s NBC series Tarzan, has died at age 86. Ely's daughter, Kirsten Casale Ely, told the AP on Wednesday that her father died Sept. 29 at his home in Los Alamos, California. While Ron Ely was not quite as well-known as Johnny Weismuller, the Olympic swimmer who played Tarzan in movies in the 1930s and 1940s, Ely helped form the image of the shirtless, loincloth-wearing character further immortalized by Disney. Ely said in interviews that he did his own stunts on the show, working directly and precariously with the tigers, chimpanzees, and other wild animals that were Tarzan's friends and servants.

Ely also played the title character in the 1975 action film Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze, but otherwise had mostly small roles in TV and films, including the 1958 movie musical South Pacific. He also wrote a pair of mystery novels featuring a detective named Jake Sands, 1994's Night Shadows and 1995's East Beach. "He was an actor, writer, coach, mentor, family man and leader," Kirsten Ely said in an Instagram post. "He created a powerful wave of positive influence wherever he went." In 2019, he tragically returned to the news when his 62-year-old wife, Valerie Lundeen Ely, was stabbed to death at their home in Santa Barbara, California, by their 30-year-old son, Cameron Ely, who was subsequently shot and killed by police.

Born in Hereford, Texas, and raised in Amarillo, Ron Ely married his high school sweetheart in 1959, but divorced two years later. In the early 1980s, Ely was host of the Miss America pageant and met Valerie, a Miss Florida, there. They married in 1984. The couple had three children, and Ely retired from acting to focus on his family in 2001. "That way I could be with the kids all through school and be able to attend their sports games and things," he told London's Daily Express in 2013, expressing interest in the time at reentering acting. He would return briefly in the 2014 TV movie Expecting Amish. Along with Kirsten Casale Ely, he is survived by daughter Kaitland Ely Sweet. (More obituary stories.)