Jack De Mave, Actor on ‘Lassie’ and ‘The Mary Tyler Moore Show,’ Dies at 91

Jack De Mave, Actor on ‘Lassie’ and ‘The Mary Tyler Moore Show,’ Dies at 91

Jack De Mave, who portrayed a U.S. forest ranger on Lassie and an unconventional date for Valerie Harper’s Rhoda Morgenstern on the second episode of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, has died. He was 91.

De Mave died Jan. 16 in hospice care in Macon, Georgia, his friend Vickie Lovett told The Hollywood Reporter. He had suffered a heart attack on Thanksgiving Day, she said.

The hunky De Mave also appeared in such films as the Rock Hudson-starring Blindfold (1966), 1776 (1972) — as John Penn — and Mel Gibson’s The Man Without a Face (1993), and in the 1970s, he played The Lone Ranger in a series of Frito-Lay commercials that led to appearances in parades and in front of kids as the wholesome lawman.

The stage-trained actor joined the cast of the enduring CBS drama Lassie at the start of its 15th season as Forest Ranger Bob Erickson in 1968 and worked on 23 episodes over two years. (He teamed with Jed Allan as fellow ranger Scott Turner during his time there.)

On The Mary Tyler Moore Show episode “Today I Am a Ma’am,” which premiered in September 1970, De Mave played Armond Lynton, who is invited by Rhoda to an evening get-together after she had accidentally “run him over” with her car a couple of days earlier. She had admired his “cleft chin.”

He arrives at Mary’s apartment with his wife of three weeks, Nancy (Sheilah Wells), and that leads Rhoda to introduce him: “And this is my date, Mr. and Mrs. Armand Lynton.”

De Mave returned to the CBS sitcom as the now-single Armand for the second-season episode “Don’t Break the Chain.”

John Francois De Mave was born on Dec. 8, 1933, in Jersey City, New Jersey. His father, also Jack De Mave, was a Holland-born heavyweight boxing contender in the late 1920s and said to be Clifford Odets’ inspiration for the play Golden Boy. (His godfather was boxer Primo Carnera.)

His mother, Helen, was a casting director on Broadway, and through her, he got to meet Paul Muni backstage after a performance of Inherit the Wind in 1955. He told the Oscar winner, “I was thinking about maybe becoming an actor, but now I know that’s what I want to do,” he recalled in an interview a few years ago.

De Mave studied with Herbert Berghof, Mary Welch and Lee Strasberg, acted on local stages with Inger Stevens and Charlton Heston and appeared in 1958 with Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne in their last Broadway play, The Visit.

After working on live television on such anthology shows as Kraft Theatre, he moved to Los Angeles and showed up on episodes of such series as Surfside 6, Wagon Train, The F.B.I., F Troop and Daniel Boone before landing on Lassie.

De Mave also played the newscaster son of Bette Davis’ character in the 1974 NBC telefilm Hello Mother, Goodbye!; had roles on the soaps Days of Our Lives, The Bold and the Beautiful and Loving; and booked guest spots on Marcus Welby, M.D., The Fugitive, Adam-12, The Doris Day Show and Ellery Queen.

He was married to Camille De Mave, who served as an assistant for Paul Newman and George Roy Hill, from 1963 until her death in 2013. His sister, Jachelene De Mave, a onetime ABC publicist, died seven or eight years ago, Lovett said.

Lovett said she has adopted De Mave’s beloved Sheltie, Tyler.