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- Michael Ontkean, best known for playing the minor league hockey player Ned Braden in the cult classic Slap Shot (1977), was born on January 24, 1946 in Vancouver, British Columbia. His parents, Leonard and Muriel (née Cooper) Ontkean, were actors. Michael was raised Catholic and attended Catholic elementary and high schools. Like many young Canadian men, he grew up playing hockey. He was good enough to earn a hockey scholarship to the University of New Hampshire, a Division I program. He was a standout player at UNH in his three seasons as a varsity player from 1966-69. (Division I hockey teams did not allow freshmen to play on the varsity team in those days.) After graduating from UNH in 1969, he did not pursue a professional hockey career but appeared on the Canadian series Hudson's Bay (1959), which ran for one season in 1959-60, but did not appear again professionally as an actor until an episode of Ironside (1967) was broadcast in 1970. He moved to Los Angeles to become an actor.
After taking roles on episodic TV shows and appearing in TV movies from 1970-72, he had his breakthrough with a lead in the TV series The Rookies (1972), which debuted in September 1972. He played policeman Willie Gillis on the series, but left after the 1973-74 season and was replaced by Chris Owens (Bruce Fairbairn). His co-star, Kate Jackson, would later appear as his wife in the then-controversial 1982 film Making Love (1982), in which Ontkean played a married man who leaves his wife after coming out after an affair with his gay lover.
Earlier, Ontkean's skill as a hockey player enabled him to beat out Peter Straus and other actors for the role as the disaffected Ned Braden in Slap Shot (1977). In the film, he performed all of his on-ice shots himself. Subsequently, he had a major role in Paul Mazursky's Willie & Phil (1980), but neither that movie or "Making Love" was a hit. (Peter Strauss -- who lost the role in "Slap Shot" to Ontkean but became a bigger star after the success of Rich Man, Poor Man (1976) -- turned down the role of the closeted gay husband played by Ontkean in "Making Love".)
Ontkean's most memorable role since the early 1980s was Sheriff Harry S. Truman) in David Lynch's cult classic TV series Twin Peaks (1990). He lives in Hawaii with his wife, Jamie Smith Jackson. - Actor
- Soundtrack
Keith Michell was an Emmy Award-winning Australian stage, television, and film actor. Born 1 December 1926 in Adelaide, South Australia, he was brought up some 150 miles away, in Warnertown, on the Augusta Highway between Crystal Brook and Port Pirie. He taught art until he made his debut on the Adelaide stage in 1947, following that up with his first appearance in London in 1951.
Michell was a member of the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre Company. From 1974-77, he was the artistic director of the Chichester Festival Theatre. He has starred in several musicals, including the first London production of Man of La Mancha (1972). In addition to his stage work, he appeared extensively in film and television in Australia and the UK, most notably as King Henry VIII in the six-part 1970 BBC series The Six Wives of Henry VIII (1970), for which he won an Emmy Award. A movie version was made in 1972. On US television, he appeared in various episodes of Murder, She Wrote (1984). In addition to acting, he wrote a musical adaptation of Henrik Ibsen's 'Peer Gynt', called "Pete McGynty and the Dreamtime". He also paints and illustrates books, as well as written and illustrated cookbooks.
Michell married the Anglo-Czech actress Jeanette Sterke in 1957; they had two children: actor Paul Michell and actress Helena Michell. He died on 20 November 2015, aged 88, in Hampstead, London, England. A theater in Port Pirie, the Keith Mitchell Theatre-Northern Festival Centre, was founded in his honor.