{"id":220,"date":"2009-01-19T10:31:40","date_gmt":"2009-01-19T10:31:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/pontifications\/2009\/01\/secret-agent-man-rip.html"},"modified":"2009-01-19T10:31:40","modified_gmt":"2009-01-19T10:31:40","slug":"secret-agent-man-rip","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/2009\/01\/secret-agent-man-rip.html","title":{"rendered":"Secret Agent Man, RIP"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Secret<\/span>Patrick McGoohan has died, the actor best known (well, to me) for his role in the 1960’s CBS serial, “Secret Agent,” which is today perhaps best remembered by others for the unforgettable Johnny Rivers theme, “Secret Agent Man.” <\/a>McGoohan (and the Rivers’ riffs) epitomized that Sixties cool, when Miles Davis and James Bond both wore slim suits and it worked for them both. The sensibility does seem to be making a comeback with “Mad Man,” but their “undercover” exploits are far seedier than these pre-“24” agents of the 1960s.
\nSpeaking of seedy, I did not know until reading the obituaries–“Wired” has a very good one<\/a>–that McGoohan turned down the role of both James Bond and “The Saint,” another favorite of the era that opened a pathway for Roger Moore.
\nNor did I know that McGoohan had studied for the priesthood (or that he was born in Queens! His family emigrated to Ireland then England when he was a child). According to Wikipedia’s bio<\/a>, McGoohan big break came in 1955 when he starred in a West End production of a play called “Serious Charge,”<\/a> in the role of a priest unjustly accused of molesting a young man.
\nMcGoohan’s Catholic culture continued to influence his roles. While James Bond was a womanizer, “Secret Agent” John Drake was decidedly not, and on purpose. McGoohan also insisted that Drake use his brain before his gun. Depsite the lack of sex and violence, “Danger Man,” as it was originally called, became the No. 1 hit in England.
\nFilm and TV buffs have rightly highlighted McGoohan’s broader body of work, in particular the surrealist series “The Prisoner,” and they reflect on it better than I can. Others may remember him in Disney films like “The Three Lives of Thomasina,” and he was a voice in a 200 episode of “The Simpsons.” (I like John Murphy’s post at “Catholic Film Reviewer.”<\/a>) In short, McGoohan’s life and work was not as well known as it deserves to be.
\nMcGoohan was 80, and died in Los Angeles. (H\/T to CNS<\/a>.) He is survived by his wife of 57 years, and his three daughters and five grandchildren. And last June, he became a great-grandfather.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Patrick McGoohan has died, the actor best known (well, to me) for his role in the 1960’s CBS serial, “Secret Agent,” which is today perhaps best remembered by others for the unforgettable Johnny Rivers theme, “Secret Agent Man.” McGoohan (and the Rivers’ riffs) epitomized that Sixties cool, when Miles Davis and James Bond both wore…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":128,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,6,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-220","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-catholic","category-church","category-pop-culture"],"yoast_head":"\nSecret Agent Man, RIP - Pontifications<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/2009\/01\/secret-agent-man-rip.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Secret Agent Man, RIP - 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He came by all those vocations by accident, or Providence, during a longer-than-expected sojourn in Rome in the 1980s. Gibson began his journalistic career as a walk-on sports editor and columnist at The International Courier, a small daily in Rome serving Italy's English-language community. He then found a job as a newscaster and writer across the Tiber at the English Programme at Vatican Radio, an entity he describes as a cross between NPR and Armed Forces Radio for the pope. The Jesuits who ran the radio were charitable enough to hire Gibson even though he had no radio background, could not pronounce the name \"Karol Wojtyla,\" and wasn't Catholic. Time and experience overcame all those challenges, and Gibson went on to cover dozens of John Paul II's overseas trips, including papal visits to Africa, Europe, Latin America and the United States. When Gibson returned to the United States in 1990 he returned to print journalism to cover the religion beat in his native New Jersey for two dailies. He worked first for The Record of Hackensack, and then for The Star-Ledger of New Jersey, winning the nation's top awards in religion writing at both places. In 1999 he won the Supple Religion Writer of the Year contest, and in 2000 he was chosen as the Templeton Religion Reporter of the Year. Gibson is a longtime board member of the Religion Newswriters Association and he is a contributor to ReligionLink, a service of the Religion Newswriters Foundation. Since 2003, David Gibson has been an independent writer specializing in Catholicism, religion in contemporary America, and early Christian history. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Boston Magazine, Commonweal, America, The New York Observer, Beliefnet and Religion News Service. He has produced documentaries on early Christianity for CNN and other networks and has traveled on assignment to dozens of countries, with an emphasis on reporting from Europe and the Middle East. He is a frequent television commentator and has appeared on the major cable and broadcast networks. He is also a regular speaker at conferences and seminars on Catholicism, religion in America, and journalism. Gibson's first book, The Coming Catholic Church: How the Faithful are Shaping a New American Catholicism (HarperSanFrancisco), was published in 2003 and deals with the church-wide crisis revealed by the clergy sexual abuse crisis. The book was widely hailed as a \"powerful\" and \"first-rate\" treatment of the crisis from \"an academically informed journalist of the highest caliber.\" His second book, The Rule of Benedict: Pope Benedict XVI and His Battle with the Modern World (HarperSanFrancisco), came out in 2006 and is the first full-scale treatment of the Ratzinger papacy--how it happened, who he is, and what it means for the Catholic Church. The Rule of Benedict has been praised as \"an exceptionally interesting and illuminating book\" from \"a master storyeller.\" Born and raised in New Jersey, David Gibson studied European history at Furman University in South Carolina and spent a year working on Capitol Hill before moving to Italy. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter and is working on a book about conversion, and on several film and television projects.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/author\/dgibson"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/220","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/128"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=220"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/220\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=220"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=220"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=220"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}