Michael Landon - Culver City, CA - Grave of a Famous Person on Waymarking.com

For 14 years, actor Michael Landon played the role of Little Joe Cartwright on all 430 episodes of the immensely popular TV show ‘Bonanza.’ Subsequently, he played the leading role in every episode of ‘Little House on the Prairie,’ all 187 of them. After spending all that time on the ‘Ponderosa’ in Nevada and the prairie frontier of Minnesota, it may come as a surprise that Michael Landon was actually a city boy from Queens, New York, who grew up in New Jersey.

Michael Landon (birth name: Eugene Maurice Orowitz) was a star athlete in high school. In 1954, he was the top javelin thrower in the entire country, which led to a scholarship to USC. But a shoulder injury sidelined his athletic career and he decided to pursue acting. He liked to say that he chose his stage name from the Los Angeles phone book.

Before his starring roles on ‘Bonanza’ and ‘Little House on the Prairie,’ Landon had roles in several movies and television shows. After ‘Little House,’ he starred in and directed another hit television show: ‘Highway to Heaven’ which aired for five years. In spite of being one of the biggest names in television for three decades, Landon never came close to an Emmy Award.

Michael Landon died from pancreatic cancer in 1991 at the age of 54. He is laid to rest in is own mausoleum at Hillside Memorial Park in Culver City, California. Before he died, Landon stated that he believed his excessive smoking was a contributing factor to his health problems. Though his roles in westerns were fictitious, he was a kind of real-life ‘Marlboro Man,’ smoking four packs of unfiltered cigarettes a day for over thirty years.
(Source: wikipedia.org, imdb.com)

Description: See Long Description above. Date of birth: 10/31/1936 Date of death: 07/01/1991 Area of notoriety: Entertainment Marker Type: Other Setting: Indoor Visiting Hours/Restrictions: 8:00 am to 5:00 pm (closed Saturdays) Fee required?: No Web site: [Web Link]

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