Peter Breck | 'Big Valley' actor, 82

Peter Breck, 82, who starred as Barbara Stanwyck's most temperamental son, Nick Barkley, in the popular 1960s Western series

The Big Valley

, died Monday in Vancouver, British Columbia, where he had lived since the 1980s.

Mr. Breck began his acting career shortly after serving in the Navy. He studied drama and English at the University of Houston and began appearing in productions at the Alley Theater in Houston before moving on to the Arena Stage theater in Washington, where Robert Mitchum saw him in George Bernard Shaw's Man of Destiny and offered him a small role in his next film, Thunder Road.

Mr. Breck had already made his television debut, in 1956, in an episode of Sheriff of Cochise, which was not a Western but a contemporary police drama. But Westerns seemed to be his particular destiny. In 1959 he starred in Black Saddle, a short-lived series about a gunfighter who becomes a lawyer.

Beginning in 1961, he played Doc Holliday in a half-dozen episodes of Maverick. And in 1965 he was cast in The Big Valley, a drama about a prosperous ranch family in the Old West, which ran four seasons on ABC. The show, a kind of matriarchal version of Bonanza, also starred Lee Majors, Linda Evans, and Richard Long.

He appeared in feature films over the years but concentrated on theater work beginning in the 1970s and eventually founded an acting school in Vancouver. His last screen appearance was in Jiminy Glick in Lalawood, the 2004 Martin Short comedy.

Mr. Breck was born in Rochester, N.Y. Because his father was a jazz musician often on the road, Peter lived with his grandparents in Haverhill, Mass., which they felt would offer him a more stable childhood.

In 1960 he married Diana Bourne, a dancer. She survives him. Their son, Christopher, died of leukemia in his 20s. - N.Y. Times News Service