Yahoo Lifestyle The Mod Squad Star Michael Cole Dead at 84
Michael Cole, who gained fame as one of the three stars of ABC’s The Mod Squad, has died at the age of 84.
Cole passed away Tuesday in Los Angeles at Providence Cedars-Sinai Tarzana Medical Center, his publicist Rachel Harris tells The Hollywood Reporter. No official cause of death has been released.
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Cole worked in film and theater, along with a guest appearance on Gunsmoke, before landing the role of undercover cop Pete Cochran when The Mod Squad debuted on ABC in 1968, starring alongside Peggy Lipton and Clarence Williams III. The show centered on a trio of young crooks pressed into service as undercover cops to pay for their crimes, and it became a sensation, with the three leads tapping into the hippie counterculture movement of the late ’60s.
The Mod Squad ran for five seasons, wrapping up its run in 1973, and Cole, Lipton and Williams all returned for a 1979 reunion movie, The Return of the Mod Squad. (A 1999 movie version of The Mod Squad starred Claire Danes, Omar Epps and Giovanni Ribisi.) Following the series, Cole made guest appearances on Wonder Woman, The Love Boat, CHiPs, Fantasy Island, Murder, She Wrote and ER. He also played Harlan Barrett on General Hospital and the adult version of Henry Bowers in the 1990 ABC adaptation of Stephen King’s It.
Cole recognized that his fame largely stemmed from his time on The Mod Squad: He titled his 2018 memoir I Played the White Guy. As for his The Mod Squad castmates, Lipton passed away in 2019 following a battle with cancer at the age of 72, and Williams died in 2021 of colon cancer at the age of 81.
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