Peter Graves

Actor Peter Graves was best known to TV audiences as the star of the popular spy series Mission: Impossible, in both its original 1960s run and the 1988 revival. Graves portrayed Impossible Missions Force leader Jim Phelps. Graves would go on to host the long-running A&E documentary series Biography, introducing profiles of famous and notable people throughout the show's 12-year run.

Graves died on March 14, 2010, after suffering a heart attack at his home in Pacific Palisades, California. He was 83 years old.http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/15/arts/television/15graves.html

Graves started his career as a film actor, appearing in small roles in a number of notable films (such as Billy Wilder's Stalag 17 and the Robert Mitchum thriller Night of the Hunter. He also starred in a variety of "B-movies" that later become fodder for cult movie fans and the parody TV series Mystery Science Theater 3000. One such film, 1954's Killers From Space was actually directed by Billy Wilder's brother, W. Lee Wilder.http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0047149/

Graves started his career on television with guest appearances on a number of anthology series, such as Fireside Theater and Studio One. In the late 1950s, Graves starred in the NBC dramatic series Fury as a rancher who adopts a son, and soon after, he was cast in the Western series Whiplash as an American who moves to Australia to start a stagecoach line.

Graves is perhaps best known to modern audiences for his role as Jim Phelps, team leader on the classic CBS spy-action series Mission: Impossible. The show ran until 1973 and later had a revival run from 1988 to 1990. It also spawned a popular series of films starring Tom Cruise as new "Impossible Missions Force" team leader Ethan Hunt and Jon Voight as Phelps. In each episode of the series, Graves' character would receive a recorded message informing him of his latest assignment, always beginning with the familiar greeting "Good morning, Mr. Phelps," a phrase that would become the show's calling card.

Much like fellow classic film and TV star Leslie Nielsen, Graves became well-known for playing up his classic "no nonsense" attitude in comic films and commercials later in his career. Both Nielsen and Graves appeared in the iconic comedy film Airplane!, mocking their former screen personas. Graves, as the doomed airplane's pilot, Captain Oveur, has many of the film's most-quotable lines, asking inappropriate questions of a young passenger named Joey. Graves initially objected to some of the lines, such as when he asks young Joey if he had "ever been in a Turkish prison" (a reference to the film Midnight Express) or if he "liked movies about gladiators."http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/15/arts/television/15graves.html He later reprised the role in the film's sequel, Airplane II.

• 1953: Stalag 17

• 1955: The Long Gray Line

• 1955: The Night of the Hunter

• 1955-1960: Fury (TV series)

• 1961: Whiplash (TV series)

• 1963: The Alfred Hitchcock Hour (TV series)

• 1965-1966: Court Martial (TV series)

• 1966-1978: Disneyland (TV series)

• 1967-1973: Mission: Impossible (TV series)

• 1978-1983: Fantasy Island (TV series)

• 1979: The Clonus Horror

• 1980: Airplane!

• 1982: Airplane II: The Sequel

• 1988-1990: Mission: Impossible (TV series revival)

• 1994-2006: Biography

• 1997-2007: 7th Heaven (TV series)