Dan Haggerty, the burly, bearded actor who starred in the 1974 film The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams and went on to reprise the role in the subsequent TV series, has died at age 74 after a battle with cancer.
Born in Pound, Wisconsin on November 19, 1941, Haggerty moved to California after graduating from high school with an eye toward pursuing an acting career. Work was slow for Haggerty at first, and the majority of his early acting jobs were uncredited. But he did earn brief appearances in the Frankie Avalon/Annette Funicello classic Muscle Beach Party, Elvis Presley’s Girl Happy, and Easy Rider. The latter film helped set the stage for the next several years of Haggerty’s career, providing him not only with an acting gig, but also the chance to work behind the scenes on the motorcycles.
“Dennis (Hopper) and Peter and I were pretty good friends, and they said, ‘Look, why don’t you come work on the bikes and do some things like that?,’” Haggerty said in a 2008 interview at the AMA Motorcycle Hall of Fame Museum in Pickerington, Ohio. Decades later, Haggerty’s work on Easy Rider and his friendship with Tex Hall, one of the film’s stunt riders, led him to become one of the players in a legal battle surrounding the authenticity of a Captain America chopper, the motorcycle ridden by Peter Fonda in the film, put up for bid by the Profiles in History Auction House.
After Easy Rider, Haggerty continued to work regularly in motorcycle films throughout the early ’70s, including Angels Die Hard, Chrome And Hot Leather, Bury Me An Angel, Pink Angels, and Superchick. Plus—per IMDb—he holds the dubious distinction of being the only actor to have appeared in both Easy Rider and 1973’s Sleazy Rider. More notable for Haggerty was 1971’s The Tender Warrior, directed by Stewart Raffill (Mac And Me, Tammy And The T-Rex), which provided Haggerty with his first shot as a leading man and led to a future collaboration with Raffill on 1974’s When the North Wind Blows, a.k.a. Snow Tigers, distributed by Sunn Classic Pictures.
Per Haggerty in a 2014 interview, Sunn Classic had already worked on a Grizzly Adams film with another actor, but when Patrick Frawley, one of the studio’s founding executives, saw dailies from Snow Tigers and spotted Haggerty, he exclaimed, “Now that guy should be Grizzly Adams, not that other we guy we had!” After asking his secretary if she knew the name of the actor, Frawley was surprised to learn that not only did she know his name, she was his wife. In short order, Haggerty was contacted in Canada, where he was still filming Snow Tigers, and asked to fly back to meet with Frawley.
“He said, ‘Look, I made a movie called Grizzly Adams, but I’m not crazy about it,’” said Haggerty. “‘How would you like to be Grizzly Adams as a young man? And the footage we have already will fade into the old character.’ I said, ‘No, I’d rather just do the whole thing myself, if that’s okay.’ He said, ‘Well, we only have $185,000 left in the budget.’ I said, ‘Well, let’s see what we can do.’”:
They did quite well: The Life And Times Of Grizzly Adams, the story of a frontier woodsman who forges a new life for himself in the wilderness after being accused of a murder he didn’t commit, went on to gross more than $45 million domestically and $65 worldwide before ending up as the 7th highest grossing film of 1974.