Actor Jack Lord, best remembered as Detective Steve McGarrett on the long-running series Hawaii Five-O, died on January 21, 1998, at his home in Hawaii at the age of 77. The cause was congestive heart failure, and he had been suffering from Alzheimer’s disease in his final years. Born John Joseph Patrick Ryan on December 30, 1920, in New York, Lord grew up in the Morris Park section of Queens. His father, William Lawrence Ryan, worked as a blue-collar employee for a steamship company, and the family was of Irish-American descent.
As a child, Lord developed an early love for horses on his family’s ancestral fruit orchard and spent summers at sea. He also showed talent as a painter, creating landscapes of the places his family visited in Africa and the Mediterranean, and initially planned to become an artist. He attended Saint Benedict Joseph Labre School and later John Adams High School in New York. After graduating in June 1938, he studied fine arts education at New York University on a football scholarship.
With his brother Bill, he established the Village Academy of Arts. Lord’s first marriage, to Anne Cicely Willard in 1942, ended in divorce in 1947. He described it as a youthful romance that followed a whirlwind courtship, acknowledging that the marriage suffered because the couple was young and he was working away from home during World War II. During the war, Lord enlisted in the U.
S. Army’s Engineering Corps and was posted in Persia. After the conflict ended, he briefly served on a merchant ship before training as a deck officer at Fort Trumbull, where he was involved in making warfare training films and developed an interest in acting. Pursuing a new career, Lord trained under acting coach Sanford Meisner and supported himself by selling cars for Horgan Ford and later Cadillac.
He made his film debut in the 1949 anti-communist production The Red Menace, and the following year worked as an associate producer on the film Cry Murder. In 1954, Lord made his Broadway debut in Horton Foote’s The Traveling Lady, winning the Theatre World Award for his portrayal of Slim Murphy. He later replaced Ben Gazzara as Brick in the 1955–1956 production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Lord appeared in the 1957 film Williamsburg: The Story of a Patriot and in 1958 played Buck Walden in the film adaptation of Erskine Caldwell’s God’s Little Acre.
That same year, he appeared in Man of the West. In 1962, he played rodeo cowboy Stoney Burke in the series of the same name, a character modeled on champion rider Casey Tibbs. He also appeared in an episode of 12 O’Clock High as Colonel Prez Gallagher in 1965, and starred with Susan Strasberg in The Name of the Game in 1968. Later in 1968, Lord took on the role that would define his career: Detective Steve McGarrett in Hawaii Five-O.
The series ran until 1980. After it ended, he directed a failed pilot for CBS called M Station Hawaii and subsequently withdrew from public life. Lord had married Marie Dinarde, a fashion designer, in 1949. He is survived by that marriage.
His son from his first marriage was killed in an accident at age 13; Lord had reportedly met the boy only once. In later years, Lord struggled with chain-smoking. Although traditional methods of quitting had failed, he said his faith helped him give up the habit after he made a solemn promise in a Catholic church to never smoke again.