B.C. television actor Donnelly Rhodes has died at the age of 80 at McKenney Creek Hospice in Maple Ridge.
Talent agency Northern Exposure said Rhodes died of cancer Monday at the facility next to Ridge Meadows Hospital.
He was best-known in Canada for his roles in Da Vinci’s Inquest and Sidestreet, as well as Tron: Legacy.
According to his IMDb biography, he was born in 1937 in Winnipeg and raised there. He was the son of Canadian playwright Anne Henry.
Rhodes trained to be a warden in the National Park Service in Manitoba and joined the Royal Canadian Air Force as an airman-mechanic before finally settling into a career as an actor.
Rhodes studied at the Manitoba Theatre Centre and was a member of the first graduating class of the National Theatre School in Canada.
After making his professional debut on stage as Stanley Kowalski in Streetcar Named Desire, he became a contract player for Universal Pictures in the U.S., landing film and television roles ranging from a gunslinger in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) to a country singer in The Hard Part Begins (1973) to various guest appearances in series such as Mission: Impossible (1966).
He later played the suave Phillip Chancellor Sr. on The Young and the Restless (1973), but left the show in 1976.
He worked in a wide variety of television and theatrical movies and making guest appearances on more than 100 television series.
Major TV roles saw him range from dim-witted escaped con Dutch on Soap (1977) to veterinarian and family man Dr. Grant Roberts on the popular Canadian family series Danger Bay (1984).
More recently, he has appeared in a number of TV movies, as well as in guest spots on popular series such as Sliders (1995) and The X-Files (1993).
In 2002, he earned a Gemini award for Best Performance by an Actor in a Continuing Leading Dramatic Role
Da Vinci’s Inquest. He was nominated for three other Gemini awards and in 2006 was given a Gemini Earle Grey Award for Lifetime Achievement.
In more recent years, he appeared in TV series Legends of Tomorrow, The Flash, Coded and Arctic Air, as well as the TV movie Mr. Hockey: The Gordie Howe Story.
Outside of acting, Rhodes’ interests included music and horses, but his real passion was boats and once considered a career as a naval architect.
Rhodes was married four times and had two children.
