Biography
The younger brother of
Gunsmoke star
James Arness, American actor Peter Graves worked as a musician and radio actor before entering films with 1950's
Rogue River. At first, it appeared that Graves would be the star of the family, since he was cast in leads while brother Jim languished in secondary roles. Then came
Stalag 17 (1953), in which Graves was first-rate as a supposedly all-American POW who turned out to be a vicious Nazi spy. Trouble was, Graves played the part too well, and couldn't shake the Nazi stereotype in the eyes of most Hollywood producers. Suddenly the actor found himself in such secondary roles as
Shelley Winters' doomed husband in
Night of the Hunter (1955) (he was in and out of the picture after the first ten minutes), while sibling
James Arness was riding high with
Gunsmoke. Dissatisfied with his film career, Graves signed on in 1955 for a network kid's series about "a horse and the boy who loved him."
Fury wasn't exactly
Citizen Kane, but it ran five years and made Graves a wealthy man through rerun residuals--so much so that he claimed to be making more money from
Fury than his brother did from
Gunsmoke. In 1966, Peter Graves replaced
Steven Hill as head honcho of the force on the weekly TV adventure series Mission: Impossible, a stint that lasted until 1973. Though a better than average actor, Graves gained something of a camp reputation for his stiff, straight-arrow film characters and was often cast in films that parodied his TV image. One of the best of these lampoonish appearances was in the Zucker-Abrahams comedy
Airplane (1980), in which Graves played a deceptively macho-male airline pilot who leeringly asked an admiring young boy "Say...do you like gladiator movies?" This "out of closet" appearance apart, Peter Graves has effortlessly maintained his reliable, authoritative movie persona into the '90s, successfully replacing
Edward Herrmann as the resident documentary host on cable's Arts and Entertainment Network. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide