David Janssen was born on March 27,1931, in Naponee, a village in Franklin County in southern Nebraska, to Harold Edward Meyer, a banker, and Berniece Graf, a former Miss Nebraska and Ziegfeld girl.
11 Facts About David Janssen
2.
Young David Janssen used his stepfather's name after he entered show business as a child.
3.
David Janssen attended Fairfax High School, where he excelled on the basketball court, setting a school scoring record that lasted over 20 years.
4.
David Janssen played pilot Harry Walker in the 1973 action movie Birds of Prey.
5.
David Janssen starred as a Los Angeles police detective trying to clear himself in the killing of an apparently innocent doctor in the 1967 film Warning Shot, which was shot during a break in the spring and summer of 1966 between the third and fourth seasons of The Fugitive.
6.
David Janssen played an alcoholic in the 1977 TV movie A Sensitive, Passionate Man, which co-starred Angie Dickinson, and played an engineer who devises an unbeatable system for blackjack in the 1978 made-for-TV movie Nowhere to Run, co-starring Stefanie Powers and Linda Evans.
7.
At the time of his death, David Janssen had just begun filming a television movie playing the part of Father Damien, the priest who dedicated himself to the leper colony on the island of Molokai, Hawaii.
8.
David Janssen was a heavy drinker who smoked up to four packs of cigarettes a day.
9.
David Janssen died from a sudden heart attack in the early morning of February 13,1980, at his beachfront home in Malibu, California, at the age of 48.
10.
At the time of his death, David Janssen was filming the television movie Father Damien.
11.
David Janssen was buried at the Hillside Memorial Park Cemetery in Culver City, California.