Wendell Burton

Stage actor Wendell Burton's movie career began on a high note with 1969's The Sterile Cuckoo, when he co-starred with another newcomer to films, Liza Minnelli. In the searing 1970 prison drama Fortune and Men's Eyes (1970), Burton was cast as a young naif who, arrested on a marijuana-possession charge, is clapped into a Québéc prison exclusively populated by sexual degenerates. Thereafter, he was largely confined to below-the-title character roles. On television, Wendell Burton co-starred in the 1971 sitcom The New Dick Van Dyke Show and the 1981 miniseries East of Eden, and played the title role in a 1973 adaptation of Broadway's You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown. Burton died in 2017, at age 69.