He won a supporting part in the John Wayne western “The Undefeated” (1969), then a co-starring role opposite Mitchum in “Going Home” (1971), as a troubled young man. By the late 1960s, he was appearing on “Dragnet,” “Lassie,” “Bonanza” and the prime-time soap opera “The Survivors,” among other TV shows. He had just served a stint in the California National Guard when a casting agent, marveling at his good looks, got him a contract with Universal Studios.
He said he would have completed college, but the registration clerk literally shut the window in his face for the lunch hour and Vincent instead took his $200 and went to Mexico to party.
He settled in Ventura, where he surfed and attended Ventura College for three years. He told People magazine that he had little patience for an office job and that after high school graduation in 1963, when his father tried to strong-arm him into joining the business, “I put my surfboard in the car and left.” Jan-Michael Vincent was born in Denver on Jhis death certificate says 1945 - and grew up in Hanford in the central San Joaquin Valley, where his parents owned a billboard company. As recently as 2014, he’d spoken of his continuing trouble with alcohol and owing $70,000 in back taxes. His right leg was partially amputated in 2012 amid complications from peripheral artery disease. He played a son of Robert Mitchum’s naval officer and the love interest of Ali MacGraw’s character. His biggest breakthrough was the male ingenue part in the ABC miniseries “The Winds of War” (1983), based on Herman Wouk’s bestselling novel set during World War II. He was the hitman apprentice to Charles Bronson in “The Mechanic” (1972) and a handsome young stuntman in “Hooper” (1978), with Burt Reynolds as an aging one.Ī rare departure from form was “Buster and Billie” (1974), an unsentimental look at 1940s high school students in rural Georgia, with Vincent giving an understated performance as the local jock who breaks with social conformity and expectations - with violent results. With a surfer’s physique and charisma, Vincent entered films in the late 1960s and became a mainstay of action dramas. He was 74 by most accounts, but the certificate listed him as 73. 10 death - which was not publicly announced at the time - was confirmed by the Buncombe County Register of Deeds, which provided a death certificate listing the cause as cardiac arrest.
Jan-Michael Vincent, a golden boy of Hollywood action films in the 1970s who starred in the mid-1980s TV adventure series “Airwolf” but saw his career crater amid drug and alcohol addiction, has died in Asheville, N.C.