James Darren had Billboard hits in the ‘60s before finding a new audience with genre shows like T.J. Hooker and Star Trek.
James Darren, the wildly diverse singer-actor who scored Billboard hits and was featured in everything from Gidget to TJ Hooker to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, has passed away. He was 88.
Although James Darren got his career going in the late ‘50s, he found entirely different audiences beginning in the ‘80s by co-starting on the William Shatner-led police drama T.J. Hooker, in which he played officer Jim Corrigan, who primarily partnered with Heather Locklear’s Stacy Sheridan.
The following decade, James Darren was able to combine his crooning and acting skills, landing the role of holographic singer Vic Fontaine in seasons six and seven of Deep Space Nine. The role was originally offered to Frank Sinatra Jr., but he turned it down. Darren himself wasn’t entirely convinced it would work, either, but the character ended up being a fan favorite and a trademark role for Darren, who not only brought his own style to Fontaine but found it to be a fun character to play.
Also on the sci-fi front, James Darren starred in the short-lived but incredibly fun series The Time Tunnel, playing Dr. Tony Newman, one of the men in charge of a project to develop a time machine and who finds himself aboard the Titanic, at Pearl Harbor and amidst the Trojan War.
Prior to all of this late-career success, however, James Darren had a billboard hit with “Goodbye Cruel World”, just a few years after getting his movie career going, although most of those films were low-level fare. However, he did get the role of surfer Jeffrey Matthews aka Moondoggie in three Gidget movies, co-starring with three different Gidgets. The same year he appeared in his final Gidget, he sang the title song for Under the Yum-Yum Tree.
While James Darren saw hiatuses at various points in his work life — particularly later on — and his movie career fizzled in the ‘70s, his resurgence helped solidify him with a new generation and his drive was clear. As he once said, “The most important thing is that you are happy with you. Not anybody’s career, no one that I know of, has always been climbing. It always levels out and you want to make sure you have good investments and financial security and bread on the table. If projects aren’t coming to you, then you seek them out and you try to develop and put projects together.”
What was the most memorable James Darren appearance? Drop your pick in the comments section below.