Larry Hagman, villainous J.R. Ewing on 'Dallas' dies at 81

Larry Hagman, 81, an eccentric Good Time Charlie who played the most popular villain in television history, died Friday at a Dallas hospital of complications from cancer, the Dallas Morning News reported.

Mr. Hagman, the son of stage star Mary Martin, appeared in many movies - none of them remarkable - and a raft of stage shows. He starred in five series on television, where his first success came in I Dream of Jeannie. He played Capt. Tony Nelson, astronaut and master to a scantily clad genie (Barbara Eden).

But it was on Dallas, as J.R. Ewing, the smiling, conniving Texas oilman who had a tomcat's libido and lower morals than a snake, that Mr. Hagman gained true fame.

Time magazine called J.R. a "human oil slick." People magazine called him "the Paul Bunyan of black hats." In real life, and long before there was J.R., Mr. Hagman often sported a white Stetson. "People trust a guy in a white hat," he said.

Viewers trusted J.R. to deliver dirty dealings. He would stop at nothing to grab a few million bucks from his good-hearted brother, Bobby (Patrick Duffy); humiliate his boozy and frequently mean-spirited wife, Sue Ellen (Linda Gray); or seduce any number of sweet young things.

One of them shot J.R. in May 1980, at the end of Dallas' second full season. "Who Shot J. R.?" became an international phenomenon. English betting parlors took wagers; the Turkish parliament recessed on the night the assassin's identity - Kristin Shepard - was to be revealed.

That episode was shown Nov. 21, 1980, in the United States, and it was the highest-rated television show to that time. Dallas, which aired Friday nights on CBS for almost all its run, was the No. 1- or No. 2-rated show for five seasons, 1980-85.

When the series finally closed on May 3, 1991, after 356 episodes, it was the third-longest-running drama in TV history, after Gunsmoke (20 seasons) and Bonanza (14).

J.R. Ewing was the show's soul, and Mr. Hagman brought him to life. Theories on J.R.'s appeal were plentiful. He had freedom, money, power, and sex in a combination that no mortal could have. But Mr. Hagman made J.R. a joyful, almost childlike villain. Mr. Hagman's secret: "Once you give up integrity, the rest is a piece of cake."

As an actor, Mr. Hagman was only part J.R. "He has a beautiful sense of the silly," Mr. Hagman's friend Claudio Guzman, who was also the producer of Jeannie, said in the late 1960s, "the sort of thing that only Jack Lemmon does well."

Mr. Hagman grew up in the shadow of his mother, who became one of the most popular stage performers in American history, but who was nothing more than a 16-year-old Texas cutie pie when Mr. Hagman was born on Sept. 21, 1931.

He learned the ways of a rough-and-tumble Texas oilman at his father's side. Mr. Hagman spent his first five years in Weatherford, Texas, 60 miles from Dallas. His father, Ben Hagman, was a lawyer for wildcatters all over Texas, and in his teens, the younger Hagman had ambitions to practice law.

But he was infrequently home in Texas. After Mary Martin's career gained momentum, he was raised primarily by her mother in Los Angeles. He attended Black Fox Military Academy until he was 12 and then a succession of boarding schools. He spent one year at bohemian Bard College. ("I was terribly rich and terribly oddball and couldn't get into any other college," he said.)

He started scraping around in the theater in 1949, and that began 15 years of hand-to-mouth work as a performer that included stints at St. John Terrell's Music Circus in Lambertville, N.J., in the early 1950s.

He got a small part in South Pacific - his mother was the star - in London in 1951 and followed that with four years in the Air Force, where he put on shows for the boys in Europe and North Africa. His stage career concluded in New York in 1964, when he appeared in four Broadway plays.

He married Maj (pronounced "My") Axelsson, a Swedish seamstress and costume designer, in 1954. The couple had two children, Heidi, 54, and Preston, 50.

Television production was centered in New York in the 1950s, and Mr. Hagman won roles in almost all the "Golden Age" live drama shows, including The U.S. Steel Hour, Omnibus, and Kraft Television Theatre.

When the Hagmans moved to Los Angeles in 1964, however, they were basically broke. Then came I Dream of Jeannie. The show was silly (thanks to Mr. Hagman) and risqué (thanks to Barbara Eden) at the same time. While it was popular, it was never a Top 25 hit. NBC moved it to a different time slot every year and finally gave up in 1970.

Mr. Hagman was a hard bargainer who eventually earned more than $150,000 per episode for playing J.R. He was rarely seen without a glass of champagne in his hand but was also rarely seen to be drunk. He was said to have renounced drinking in 1993, on a doctor's advice, but never admitted that he was an alcoholic.

A man whose speech was peppered with earthy language, he stayed silent one day every week - although, as reporter Deborah Wilker described in 1993 in the Fort Lauderdale (Fla.) Sun-Sentinel, silence did not equal lack of communication.

Wilker's interview turned out to have been scheduled on one of Mr. Hagman's silent days. The actor answered questions with "a charismatic mix of sign language, rubberized facial twinges and some moves borrowed from living-room charades," she wrote.

In acting, Mr. Hagman also favored the quiet approach, often editing Dallas scripts himself. "The less talk, the better," he said. "A look will beat a line."