Chuck Connors

Born
April 10, 1921 · Brooklyn, New York City, New York, USA
Died
November 10, 1992 · Los Angeles, California, USA (lung cancer and pneumonia)
Birth name
Kevin Joseph Aloysius Connors
Height
6′ 5½″ (1.97 m)

In November 1990, he was devastated to hear about Burt Lancaster's stroke. He tried calling his office one day, but his office wasn't releasing any information at that time. Connors sent a letter in support of David Fury's nomination of Lancaster to the Cowboy Hall of Fame and signed the petition which Fury sent to the American film Institute nominating Lancaster for the Lifetime Achievement Award in 1991.
Connors was one of only twelve athletes in history to have played for both Major League Baseball and in the NBA.
Connors wasn't the only baseball star to appear on The Rifleman (1958), a couple of former baseball stars appeared on that show were: Duke Snider and Don Drysdale.
Before he was an actor, he spent most of the war as a tank-warfare instructor in Camp Campbell, Kentucky, before West Point, New York.
A longtime smoker, he was hospitalized with pneumonia three weeks before his death from lung cancer. He was interred at the San Fernando Mission Cemetery. His headstone has the logos of all three sports teams for which he played: Boston Celtics, Chicago Cubs, and Brooklyn Dodgers.

I don't want my kids growing up believing that there is nothing destructive in the world. I want them to know that there is good and bad in the world, that you can be hurt physically, that guns can kill you, that drugs are bad for you, that not everyone means well.
[In 1973] The President gave me about two dozen presidential tie clips and ladies' pins, with instructions to spread them around when I thought it appropriate, Brezhnev [Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev] will get more than a tie clip. I've ordered two engraved Colt revolvers for the General Secretary, Brezhnev is quite a western buff.
[on The Rifleman (1958)'s theme song] I hear the same thing everywhere I go.
Well, it isn't because I'm the fidgety guy, seriously, I have to sit there like a mummy you can't move. Regular makeup you can turn around and I sit there like that, and the worst part of it is, after working 14 hours, I can't just take it off, I have to sit for another hour because of the way they made these appliances, and they have to be taken out very slowly.
[Of Johnny Crawford] When Johnny came on the set in 1958, he was a little 12-year-old boy. He called everyone in the cast or crew "Sir" or "Ma'am". During the course of the five years of our run, he had two hit records, and he was nominated for an Emmy for Best Supporting Actor. And yet, when the show was finished after five seasons, Johnny went around and thanked everyone in the cast and crew, and he still called them "Sir" or "Ma'am".