Film & TV / Theatre & dance
Dana Elcar
1927–2005 · character actor, television director
Ferndale-born character actor best known as Pete Thornton, MacGyver's boss, whose real-life blindness was written into the show.
- Born
Ferndale, Michigan- Died
Ventura, California
aged 77- Birth name
- Ibsen Dana Elcar
- Detroit years
- 1927–1940s
- Field
- Film & TV, Theatre & dance
01 / The Detroit story
The Detroit story
Dana Elcar was born Ibsen Dana Elcar in Ferndale, the small city just north of Detroit's Eight Mile Road, on October 10, 1927. His father worked as a carpenter and butcher. After Navy service at the end of World War II he studied at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where he joined the Alpha Tau Omega fraternity, and in the 1950s he moved to New York to act. He built his career in theater and live television, then became one of Hollywood's most dependable character actors, with about 40 films, among them The Sting. Television audiences knew him first as Sheriff George Patterson on Dark Shadows and then for seven seasons as Pete Thornton, MacGyver's supervisor at the Phoenix Foundation. When glaucoma began to take his sight in 1991, the producers wrote his vision loss into the character from season six rather than replace him.
Highlights
- Pete Thornton on MacGyver (1985–1992)
- Sheriff George Patterson on Dark Shadows
- About 40 films, including The Sting (1973)
- His glaucoma-related blindness was written into MacGyver
- University of Michigan alumnus