JACK LORD, 77, star of Hawaii Five-0, television’s longest-running crime series, and the first actor to portray CIA agent Felix Leiter in the James Bond films, died Jan. 21 of congestive heart failure at his home in Honolulu. Friends acknowledged that he also had suffered for years from Alzheimer’s disease.

     Born John Joseph Patrick Ryan in Brooklyn, son of a steamship executive, Lord spent summers at sea, traveling the globe. Work in maritime training films led to bit parts — under the name Jack Ryan — in two 1949 movies, “The Red Menace” and “Project X.” In the early ’50s, he studied at the Actors Studio with classmates like Paul Newman and Marilyn Monroe. He worked on stage, taking the name Jack Lord, and gained his initial fame in 1955, replacing Ben Gazzara as Brick in the Broadway production of “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.” That sent him on to Hollywood and parts in “The Court Martial of Billy Mitchell” and “God’s Little Acre,” as well as TV guest spots on Studio One, Playhouse 90, The Millionaire, One Step Beyond, The Untouchables, Have Gun Will Travel, Route 66, Naked City, Checkmate, Bonanza, Rawhide, Wagon Train and many others.

     In 1962, Lord was cast as Felix Leiter in “Dr. No,” the first James Bond movie. Arguably the best of the many Leiters that followed, he supposedly was offered the role again when Leiter reappeared in “Goldfinger,” but demanded more money than penurious Bond producers Harry Saltzman and Cubby Broccoli were willing to pay, thus setting the stage for recasting Leiter in every Bond film.

     Also in 1962, Lord starred in his first TV series, Stoney Burke, playing a rodeo rider. The show lasted one season on ABC. More guest shots on such series as Kraft Suspense Theater, Combat, Laredo, Twelve O’Clock High, The FBI, The Invaders, The Fugitive and The Man from U.N.C.L.E. followed until Hawaii Five-0 premiered on Sept. 26, 1968. With Lord as Steve McGarrett, head of the fictional state police unit Five-0 that investigated crimes all over the islands of the 50th state and was responsible only to the governor of Hawaii (played by Richard Denning), the show was the first shot on location in Hawaii. McGarrett, a former Naval Intelligence officer, and Five-0 also engaged in counterespionage work, usually involving the show’s recurring villain, Red Chinese spymaster Wo Fat, who appeared in some two dozen episodes from the pilot to the show’s finale, played to a sly fare-thee-well by the late Khigh Dhiegh. That mixture of mostly good scripts, exotic locales and supporting actors, top-notch production, those flashy opening titles and one of TV’s most famous themes made Hawaii Five-0 one of CBS’s most popular series, and at 12 seasons the longest running cop show ever aired. When the series ended in 1980, Lord sold his interest in the show for a small fortune and retired in Hawaii, never acting again.

BURGESS MEREDITH, 88, veteran character actor whose career spanned seven decades of stage, screen, radio and television work, died Sept. 10 at his home in Malibu. His acclaimed film roles ranged from 1939’s “Of Mice and Men” to 1995’s “Grumpier Old Men,” and included “The Story of GI Joe,” “Advise and Consent,” “Hurry Sundown,” “In Harm’s Way,” “A Big Hand for the Little Lady,” “McKenna’s Gold,” “Day of the Locusts,” “Twilight Zone--The Movie,” and “Rocky” and its sequels. His TV work began in the medium's early days on segments of such series as Robert Montgomery Presents, Studio One, Omnibus and Lights Out. His later roles included four notable appearances on The Twilight Zone, guest shots on Ben Casey, Twelve O’Clock High, Burke’s Law, The Wild Wild West, The FBI, Ironside, The Name of the Game and Night Gallery among others, and numerous episodes of Batman as Special Guest Villain The Penguin. He was a regular on the final season of Mr. Novak, replacing Dean Jagger as the high school principal; on Search as V.C.R. Cameron, the crusty inventor of all the high-tech spy gadgetry; he co-hosted Those Amazing Animals on ABC in 1980; and played a veterinarian on the All in the Family spin-off Gloria.

SYDNEY NEWMAN, 80, Canadian-born British television producer who created two of the world’s most popular TV series, The Avengers and Doctor Who, died Oct. 30 in Toronto following a heart attack. As head of drama for London’s ABC Television in 1960, he cast Ian Hendry as a physician whose fiancee is murdered by drug smugglers and Patrick Macnee as a mysterious undercover agent named Steed in a tongue-in-cheek thriller he dubbed The Avengers. In 1963, after moving to the BBC, he created what was supposed to be just a weekly children’s serial; the endless charms of Doctor Who earned the show an amazing 26-year run with seven lead actors and a continuing international cult following.

LESLIE STEVENS, 74, prolific writer and producer who created The Outer Limits, died April 24 from a heart attack at UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles. He began writing plays as a teenager and worked with Orson Welles’ Mercury Theatre troupe. He was soon writing such popular plays as “Marriage-Go-Round,” movies like “The Left-Handed Gun” and television scripts for Kraft Theatre and Playhouse 90. He created and produced Jack Lord’s Stoney Burke series, then wrote and directed a spy show pilot called Stryker that, had it sold, would have gone on the air the same season that The Man From U.N.C.L.E. brought the spy craze to TV.

     In 1963 he created, with his old friend Joseph Stefano, the acclaimed science fiction series The Outer Limits. Stevens wrote and directed the pilot and three other episodes in the show's first season (ABC ousted Stevens and company for the second season). He wrote and produced It Takes a Thief in 1968 when ABC ordered a fast mid-season start for what proved to be the last of the ’60s spy shows. His other series include The Name of the Game, McCloud, the high-tech international intrigue series Search, the short-lived Invisible Man starring David McCallum (who appeared in two well-remembered Outer Limits episodes prior to U.N.C.L.E. fame), Battlestar Galactica and Buck Rogers.

LLOYD BRIDGES, 85, popular actor whose long career alternated between movies and television but peaked with the syndicated TV series Sea Hunt, died March 10 at his home in Los Angeles. Signed by Columbia Pictures in 1941, he appeared in such features as “Here Comes Mr. Jordan” and “A Walk in the Sun,” in the 1945 serial “Secret Agent X-9,” and even in a Three Stooges short. By the end of the decade he had graduated to classier fare such as “Home of the Brave” (1949) and “High Noon” (1952). He really made his mark in television, appearing in segments of Studio One, Robert Montgomery Presents, Shower of Stars, Climax, Dick Powell's Zane Grey Theatre, Desilu Playhouse, U.S. Steel Hour, Playhouse 90 and dozens more.

     In 1957, Sea Hunt went into production. Rejected by the networks, it began airing in syndication in January 1958 and was a huge hit, running for four years and exposing audiences to new TV concepts: scuba diving, underwater filming and international adventures. Six other series followed, but all lasted just one season or less. In The Lloyd Bridges Show he played a writer who imagined himself into a new adventure each week. The Loner was a moody western created by Rod Serling. San Francisco International Airport ran on NBC’s experimental Four In One series. Joe Forrester featured Bridges as an aging beat cop. He was a fashion mogul in the short-lived Paper Dolls and a newspaper editor in the even shorter lived Capital News.

     Between series he appeared in episodes of The Dick Powell Show, Kraft Suspense Theater, The Eleventh Hour, Mission: Impossible, Here's Lucy, Police Story and countless others. He also appeared in Roots and many other mini-series and TV-movies, and returned to features with parts in such films as “Airplane,” “Hot Shots” and “Tucker: The Man and His Dream.”

MAE QUESTEL, 89, stage, screen and vaudeville actress who provided the voices of Betty Boop and Olive Oyl, died Jan. 4 at her home in New York. Cartoon producer Max Fleischer saw her vaudeville act, in which she imitated famous performers, and signed her to do the voice of Betty Boop in the style of singer Helen Kane, who created a sensation in the late ’20s with her childish voice and “boop boop a doop” renditions of songs like “I Wanna Be Loved By You.” She also created the voices of Olive Oyl and Swee’pea when the Fleischer studio began the Popeye cartoon series in 1933. She continued the roles until the last Popeye cartoon was produced in 1957. Other roles included “Aunt Bluebell” in long-running paper towel commercials, and parts in the features “Funny Girl,” “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation” and “New York Stories.” In 1988 she reprised Betty Boop’s voice in “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?”

FORREST E. “SKIP” FICKLING, 72, mystery writer who created female private eye Honey West, died of a brain tumor April 3 at a nursing home in Laguna Hills, Calif. Writing with wife Gloria under the name G.G. Fickling, he turned out a dozen Honey West novels beginning with This Girl for Hire in 1956. Honey's popularity hit its peak when the cult TV series starring Anne Francis ran on ABC in the 1965-66 season.