• July 07, 1997
• Vol. 48
• No. 1

Family Man

Cancer and a Daughter's Suicide Conspire Against Actor Brian Keith

HE PLAYED EVERYTHING FROM A homicidal rancher to a stone-faced private detective, but the gruff, burly ex-Marine from Bayonne, N.J., was best known for the steady hand he kept on the family tiller in 1961's The Parent Trap, with Maureen O'Hara, and as kindly bachelor Uncle Bill, raising a pair of orphaned nieces and a nephew in his Manhattan apartment on TV's Family Affair (1966-71). Sadly, however, Brian Keith's trademark surety evidently faltered in the face of his advanced lung cancer and despair over the April 17 death by suicide of his 27-year-old actress daughter, Daisy. On the morning of June 24, family members found Keith, 75, dead, apparently from the same cause as his daughter—a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Though Keith, who reportedly had quit smoking a decade ago, was working as recently as last December, when he filmed an upcoming TNT miniseries called Rough Riders, grueling chemotherapy treatments sapped the strength of the actor, who also starred in numerous other television series, including Hardcastle & McCormick (1983-86) and Pursuit of Happiness (1987-88). More enervating still was the loss of Daisy, the youngest daughter from his second marriage, to wife Victoria. (Keith and his first wife, Judy, had lost a young son in 1963.)

For so devoted a family man, it must all have been just too much. "He was in terrible agony," a sobbing O'Hara told PEOPLE. But he stayed in character to the end. "He looked wonderful" when O'Hara, who also starred with Keith in The Deadly Companions (1961) and The Rare Breed (1966), lunched with him a few weeks ago. And Family Affair alum Johnny Whitaker, 37, who recalls Keith "making sure the set was a positive place" for his young costars, says that "he was as loving and curmudgeonly as always. He was a real Uncle Bill."