Tony Dow, the wholesome actor who played “perfect big brother” Wally Cleaver on the perennial TV sitcom Leave It to Beaver and its 1980s sequel, has died. He was 77 years old.
Dow died Tuesday morning, his representatives Frank Bilotta and Renee James said in a statement.
“Tony was a beautiful soul – kind, compassionate, funny and humble,” the statement read. “He was truly a joy to be around. His gentle voice and unassuming manner were immediately comforting and you couldn’t help but love him. The world has lost an incredible human being, but we are all richer for the memories that has left us. From the warm reminiscences of Wally Cleaver to those of us lucky enough to know him personally, thank you Tony. And thank you for the reflections of a simpler time, the laughter, the friendship and the feeling that you were a big brother to all of us.”
In May it was announced that Dow’s cancer had returned.
When Leave It to Beaver debuted on CBS in October 1957, Dow was 12 and Wally was just starting to get interested in girls. By the time the show completed its original run on ABC in June 1963, her character had graduated from Mayfield High School and headed off to college.
In the series pilot, which was shot in early 1957, Paul Sullivan played Wally opposite Jerry Mathers as his younger brother, Theodore “Beaver” Cleaver, while Barbara Billingsley and Max Showalter (aka Casey Adams) played the parents, June and Ward Cleaver. .
“CBS said, ‘OK, we’ll do the show, but you have to replace the father and the older son,'” Dow recalled in a 2018 interview. that was around.
“They hired a guy from Screen Gems called Harry Ackerman, who was kind of a classic Hollywood producer. He said, ‘Hey, I just worked with a kid, he’s a little green, you might want to check him out.’ .
The son of a double, Dow was a junior swimmer and diving champion who had appeared in two pilots for a Tarzan-like show that Ackerman produced but never made it to the air. Although this was his only acting experience, Dow was hired for Leave It to Beaver (as was Hugh Beaumont as his father).
Created by Joe Connelly and Bob Mosher, Leave It to Beaver was a family comedy that told stories not from the parents’ point of view, but from the children’s.
Connelly’s son, Jay, then 14, was the model for Wally, and his 8-year-old son, Ricky, served as inspiration for Beaver. (This was the nickname of one of Connelly’s shipmates in the US Merchant Marine.)
“Wally is the perfect big brother,” Mathers said in a 2006 interview for the Television Academy Foundation’s website The Interviews. “He is the champion basketball player, football player. It does everything right. He is a great lyricist. He gets A’s on all his papers. Everyone loves him.”
After six seasons and 234 original episodes—incredibly, the show has been in reruns or syndication and never been on the air since it began—Dow, Mathers and Billingsley returned for the 1983 CBS telefilm Still the Beaver, with Wally now working as a lawyer. . (Dow and Mathers also appeared on Kellogg’s Corn Flakes packages that year.)
It all led to a series revival that ran for four seasons (one on Disney Channel, three on TBS) until 1989.
Dow got his start as a television director on The New Leave It to Beaver, and spent the next dozen years directing episodes of other shows such as Harry and the Henderson, Coach, Babylon 5, and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and serving as a visual effects supervisor on a 1996 Doctor Who telefilm.
Anthony Lee Dow was born on April 13, 1945 in Los Angeles, the youngest of two children. Her mother was Muriel Montrose, a “bathing beauty” for Mack Sennett and later a double who often doubled for Clara Bow. His father, John, was a general contractor.
Dow was training to become an Olympic athlete and working out at the Hollywood Athletic Club. “There was a lifeguard there who was an actor,” he said. “He said to my mom, ‘I’m going to this interview for a show where they’re looking for a father and son. Can Tony go with me because we look a bit alike? He thought maybe this was the only way [he would be hired].
“I ended up getting the part and he didn’t, so it was unfortunate. The show was called Johnny Wildlife and would have been the first color series on television about a wildlife photographer and his son. He was way ahead of his time.”
Working on Leave It to Beaver “was great,” Dow said. “You always hear stories about all these arguments on set. We never had any of that. They wanted us to be as much of a family as possible, so that Jerry and I were like normal kids.
“They actually asked our parents not to let us watch the show on TV so we wouldn’t get hooked. So there are probably some episodes I haven’t seen yet. … And there was no swearing on set, not even by the crew. They wanted to keep it as familiar as possible.”
After Leave It to Beaver, Dow appeared in series such as Dr. Kildare, My Three Sons and Mr. Novak and played a character named Chet on Never Too Young, a Malibu-set soap opera tailor-made for teenagers. He also served in the National Guard, although he refused to carry a weapon of any kind, and attended UCLA and Columbia University.
Dow later appeared in The Mod Squad, Emergency!, Quincy ME, Knight Rider, Charles in Charge and Murder, She Wrote and portrayed a cop on General Hospital.
After he and Billingsley starred in a production of Come Blow Your Horn, Dow and Mathers spent 17 months in another dinner theater show called So Long, Stanley before Still the Beaver beckoned.
Dow hoped to direct the 1997 film Leave It to Beaver at Universal; when he was turned down, he said he turned down a $1,200 offer to make a cameo. “I don’t think they cared if I was there or not, it was kind of an insult,” he said. (Mathers also made a pass.)
Survivors include his second wife, Lauren, whom he married in June 1980, and their son, Christopher.