George Maharis, star of TV’s ‘Route 66' in the 1960s, dies at 94

LOS ANGELES — George Maharis, a stage-trained actor with rough-hewn good looks who became an icon to American youth in the 1960s as he cruised the country in a Corvette convertible in the hit television series “Route 66,” has died. On “Route 66,” Maharis played Buz Murdock, a hardened survivor of New York City’s Hell’s Kitchen. He got a name check that introduced him to subsequent generations in director Quentin Tarantino’s 2019 “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,” when fictional actor Rick Dalton, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, says he was considered for the Steve McQueen role in “The Great Escape” along with three Georges: “Peppard, Maharis and Chakiris.” A native New Yorker, one of seven children born to Greek immigrants, Maharis really was raised in Hell’s Kitchen. Maharis kept acting in the ensuing decades, appearing in such TV movies as “Escape to Mindanao” and “Murder on Flight 502,” “Disaster in the Sky,” “Crash of Flight 401,” “Death in Space” and on TV series including “Fantasy Island,” “The Bionic Woman” and “Murder, She Wrote.” ___ The late AP Entertainment writer Bob Thomas provided biographical material for this story.