{"id":792248,"date":"2026-10-05T02:24:10","date_gmt":"2026-10-05T02:24:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/792248\/"},"modified":"2026-10-05T02:24:10","modified_gmt":"2026-10-05T02:24:10","slug":"marjoe-gortner-dead-child-preacher-earthquake-actor-was-82","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/792248\/","title":{"rendered":"Marjoe Gortner Dead: Child Preacher, \u2018Earthquake\u2019 Actor Was 82"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tMarjoe Gortner, the celebrity child preacher who was the subject of an Oscar-winning documentary and an actor with roles in Earthquake, When You Comin\u2019 Back, Red Ryder? and Falcon Crest, has died. He was 82.<\/p>\n

\n\tGortner died Friday of complications from congestive heart failure, his family announced.<\/p>\n

\n\tWith a contract at Universal Pictures, Gortner made his onscreen acting debut as the junkie Teddy Hopper in the 1973 Joseph Sargent<\/a>-directed telefilm The Marcus-Nelson Murders, which served as the pilot for the CBS crime series Kojak, starring Telly Savalas.<\/p>\n

\n\tHe had another featured role as Jody Joad, a grocery store manager turned National Guardsman, in the Mark Robson-directed disaster movie Earthquake (1974), and he played a psychopathic, hostage-taking Vietnam veteran in Milton Katselas\u2019 When You Comin\u2019 Back, Red Ryder? (1979).<\/p>\n

\n\tOn the sixth season (1986-87) of the CBS primetime soap opera Falcon Crest, Gortner drew on his real-life experience to portray Vince Karlotti, a colorful polygamist and faux psychic medium over 17 episodes.<\/p>\n

\n\tHugh Marjoe (a combination of Mary and Joseph) Ross Gortner was born on Jan. 14, 1944, in Long Beach, California. He spoke eloquently as a child, so his parents, Vernon, a Christian evangelical minister, and mother, Marge, had him ordained as a preacher at age 4, when he performed a marriage ceremony for a Paramount newsreel.<\/p>\n

\n\tNow a celebrity, the long-haired Gortner delivered gyrating, dramatic sermons at revival meetings across the U.S. as his family amassed a fortune estimated to be worth $3 million, but he said his father took off with the money shortly before Gortner turned 16.<\/p>\n

\n\tHe rejoined the ministry as a way to earn a living and in 1971 granted a film crew access to him during his final revival tour. The resulting 1972 documentary, Marjoe, produced and directed by Howard Smith and Sarah Kernochan, debuted at Cannes and won the Oscar for best feature documentary. (The poster called it \u201ca real story millions of people refuse to believe.\u201d)<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tMarjoe Gortner in the 1972 documentary \u2018Marjoe.\u2019<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tEverett Collection<\/p>\n

\n\tIn the film, Gortner \u2014 who said he studied Mick Jagger as a model for his routine \u2014 talks about how he and other evangelists manipulated regular folks during revivals, and he\u2019s seen in his hotel room counting the money he had collected one day.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn his review for The New York Times<\/a>, Vincent Canby described the film as \u201cless a documentary about Marjoe\u2019s final weeks on the Pentecostal church-and-tent circuit than a feature-length screen test for a career in show biz.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tIn 1972, Gortner recorded an album, Bad, but Not Evil, which featured him singing Bob Dylan\u2019s \u201cI Shall Be Released\u201d and \u201cLo and Behold!,\u201d and with all this notoriety, he was signed to a contract at Universal.<\/p>\n

\n\tGortner also starred with Lynda Carter in Bobbie Jo and the Outlaw (1976), appeared in the daredevil biopic Viva Knievel! (1977) and toplined a low-budget space opera, Starcrash (1978).<\/p>\n

\n\tHis r\u00e9sum\u00e9 included appearances on Barnaby Jones, Medical Center, Police Story, Laugh-In, The A-Team, Fantasy Island, Airwolf and Hotel, and he played a preacher in Wild Bill (1995), one of his final roles.<\/p>\n

\n\tHe also produced Circus of the Stars specials and celebrity sports invitationals that helped raise money for charity.<\/p>\n

\n\tSurvivors include his fifth wife, Susan, whom he married in 2019. He was briefly married to American Graffiti actress Candy Clark \u2014 they starred together in When You Comin\u2019 Back, Red Ryder? \u2014 in the late \u201970s.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Marjoe Gortner, the celebrity child preacher who was the subject of an Oscar-winning documentary and an actor with…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":792249,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[6491,96,3879,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-792248","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment","tag-obituaries","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/792248","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=792248"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/792248\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/792249"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=792248"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=792248"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=792248"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}