Metro

‘Dallas’ star Larry Hagman dead at 81

larry_hagman03--300x300.jpg

(
)

(
)

Larry Hagman — a beloved actor who created one of America’s most iconic TV villains as the sharp-tongued tycoon J.R. Ewing on the hit show “Dallas” — died yesterday from complications of throat cancer. He was 81.

Hagman was surrounded two of his former co-stars on the show, Linda Gray and Patrick Duffy, as he died at Medical City Dallas Hospital, according to the Dallas Morning News.

“It was a peaceful passing, just as he had wished for,” his family said in a written statement.

The son of Broadway legend Mary Martin and a Texas lawyer, Hagman lived briefly in New York as a child and returned to the city to start his acting career in a production of “Taming of the Shrew.”

He first gained fame in the 1960s on the TV sitcom “I Dream of Jeannie,” playing an astronaut who discovers a gorgeous genie in a bottle.

“My deepest condolences go out to his wife Maj, his son and daughter and his grandchildren, as well as his friends in this time of his passing,” Barbara Eden, who played Jeannie, on the show wrote on Facebook. “I can honestly say that we’ve lost not just a great actor, not just a television icon, but an element of pure Americana.”

But it was “Dallas,” a nighttime soap opera that premiered on CBS in 1978, that transformed Hagman into a legend.

His character, J.R. Ewing, was the cowboy-hat-wearing, black-hearted scion of a wealthy Texas oil and cattle family that specialized in back-stabbing, adultery and violence.

The second season of Dallas ended with an unknown character shooting J.R., a cliffhanger that has become one of the best known episodes in television history: “Who shot J.R.?”

The first episode of the third season, in which it is revealed that J.R. was shot by his sister-in-law, with whom he was having an affair, was viewed by an estimated 350 million people worldwide.

In later years, he would battle health problems. Hagman called himself a lifelong alcoholic who drank four bottles of champagne a day on the “Dallas” set and had a liver transplant in 1995.

Hagman began acting again shortly before he died. He reprised his role in an updated “Dallas” series on TNT that began last June.

“Larry was back in his beloved Dallas, re-enacting the iconic role he loved most,” the family said in a statement. “Larry’s family and close friends had joined him in Dallas for the Thanksgiving holiday. When he passed, he was surrounded by loved ones,” his family said in a statement reported by the Dallas Morning News, which first reported his death.

With Post Wires