Within the early Nineteen Fifties he adopted his stage title in remembrance of Beatrice MacLeod, his drama instructor at Ithaca. He selected the primary title Gavin after a personality on the anthology tv collection “Climax.”
After discovering some stage work, Mr. MacLeod made his tv debut as a visitor star on “The Walter Winchell Information,” against the law drama. His first credited film function was in “I Need to Dwell!,” a 1958 crime drama with Susan Hayward. In 1959 he appeared within the Korean Battle movie “Pork Chop Hill” and Blake Edwards’s naval comedy “Operation Petticoat.”
By the Sixties Mr. MacLeod was showing frequently on tv collection, with guest-starring roles on “Perry Mason,” “Fight!,” “Demise Valley Days,” “Dr. Kildare,” “The Untouchables” and different exhibits. His half on “McHale’s Navy,” which starred Ernest Borgnine, was his first job as a collection common. His character, Seaman Joseph Haines, one in all a crew of misfits aboard a World Battle II PT boat, was generally known as Blissful. However Mr. MacLeod, feeling underused, was something however.
“I had, like, two strains per week,” Mr. MacLeod mentioned in a videotaped interview for the Archive of American Tv. “I began feeling sorry for myself; I began consuming. I felt that as an actor I used to be simply happening the tubes.”
As he informed the story, one night time whereas consuming he was driving on Mulholland Drive within the hills above Los Angeles when he impulsively determined to kill himself by driving off the street. However he stopped himself, jamming on the brakes on the final second. Shaken, he recalled, he made his solution to the close by home of a pal, the actor Robert Blake, who persuaded him to see a psychiatrist.
He give up “McHale’s Navy” in 1964, after two seasons, and started discovering extra satisfying components, together with a supporting one within the 1966 movie “The Sand Pebbles” with Steve McQueen.