Newswire R.I.P. Patrick McGoohan

by Keith Phipps January 14, 2009

 Actor and writer Patrick McGoohan has died at the age of 80, the BBC is reporting. McGoohan first rose to fame as the star of the U.K. series Danger Man and played high-profiles roles in films by Don Siegel and David Cronenberg. But his fame rests squarely on the cultishly adored series The Prisoner, which ran for 17 episodes in 1967 and 1968. McGoohan, who also wrote a few episodes under a pseudonym, starred in the James Bond-meets-Franz Kafka series as a spy who, after resigning, wakes up in a mysterious village assigned a new name: Number 6. His attempts to escape and prove that he's—all together now, Prisoner fans—not a number but a free man offered some of the most surreal hours television produced in the 1960s.

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