Geoffrey Deuel, the youthful brother of tragic Alias Smith and Jones actor Peter Duel who portrayed the famed outlaw Billy the Child within the John Wayne-starring Chisum, has died. He was 81.
Deuel died Sunday in hospice care in Largo, Florida, after a battle with persistent obstructive pulmonary illness, his spouse, Jacqueline Deuel, advised The Hollywood Reporter.
The square-jawed Deuel appeared on many TV reveals from the mid-Nineteen Sixties via the mid-’70s, displaying up on The Monkees, The Invaders, The FBI, The Flying Nun, Medical Middle, Mannix, Adam-12, The Mod Squad, Mission: Unimaginable, The Streets of San Francisco, Ironside, Cannon and The Younger and the Stressed, amongst others.
In his movie debut, Deuel was “launched” to moviegoers within the opening credit of Andrew V. McLaglen’s Chisum (1970), and a reviewer in The New York Instances wrote that he “minimize a personable swath” as a very vengeful Billy the Child. This yr, the web site Display screen Rant ranked his flip as Billy because the tenth greatest within the outlaw’s onscreen historical past.
Peter Duel additionally performed an outlaw, Hannibal Heyes (aka Joshua Smith), on the light-hearted ABC collection Alias Smith and Jones, which premiered in January 1971. On New 12 months’s Eve that yr, halfway via the present’s second season, he died at his Hollywood Hills house of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
“You don’t ever recover from a shock like that,” Geoffrey stated in a 2018 interview.
“He and Peter have been very shut,” Jacqueline Deuel stated. “They actually liked one another and took care of one another.”
Geoffrey Jacob Deuel was born in Lockport, New York, on Jan. 17, 1943, and raised in close by Penfield. His father, Ellsworth, was a physician and his mom, Lillian, a nurse.
After attending Penfield Excessive Faculty, Ithaca School and Syracuse College, Deuel adopted his brother to Hollywood in 1965 and appeared on a 1966 episode of ABC’s 12 O’Clock Excessive.
Geoffrey and Peter, who was three years older, labored collectively on an episode of NBC’s The Identify of the Sport that aired in February 1971.
Within the Nineteen Eighties, Deuel carried out in performs in Tampa’s Ybor Metropolis neighborhood and returned to high school to earn a grasp’s diploma from the College of South Florida. He labored for years as an alternative trainer.
Along with his spouse — they have been collectively for 40 years and married in 2017 — survivors embrace his youthful sister, Pamela.