Source : @Variety
LOS ANGELES — Michael Gray, who played teenager Billy Batson in the 1970s live-action television series “Shazam!”, has died of natural causes at the age of 75, Variety reported on Thursday (Oct 22).
According to the publication, Gray died on Friday in Palm Desert, California. No further details were given.
Gray joined the cast of “Shazam!” in 1974 as Billy Batson, the young man who transforms into the superhero Captain Marvel by speaking the word “Shazam”. He starred alongside John Davey and Les Tremayne in the Saturday morning series, which ran for three seasons until 1976. The role turned him into a teen idol, and he appeared frequently on the covers of Tiger Beat and other teen magazines of the era.
Paying tribute, Davey, who played Captain Marvel opposite him, said Gray and Tremayne had made him feel welcome from the start. “From my very first day on ‘Shazam!’, Mike and Les [Tremayne] welcomed me like a king,” Davey said. “Mike was just a loving, sweet guy with a great sense of humour. He loved acting, loved doing the show and, in recent years, loved appearing at comic cons. He really enjoyed meeting and chatting with the fans. Mike was a wonderful man. I don’t think he ever stopped smiling.”
Born in Chicago on Sept 2, 1951, Gray was raised in Miami Beach, Florida, before moving to Los Angeles to study acting at the Pasadena Playhouse. He got his first break in television in 1972, when he was cast in NBC’s “The Little People” alongside Brian Keith and Shelley Fabares. Early in his career he took supporting roles in a string of series, playing Marcia’s boyfriend Jeff on “The Brady Bunch” and appearing in “Dynasty”, “Marcus Welby, M.D.”, “Room 222” and “The Flying Nun”. His film credits included “Run, Simon, Run”, “Beyond the Valley of the Dolls” and “Myra Breckinridge”.
After “Shazam!”, Gray began to feel typecast and stepped away from acting. During that break he worked in children’s theatre education and in men’s fashion, and ran a floral business with his wife, Stacy.
His career enjoyed a revival after “Shazam!” was remastered in 2012 for release on DVD. In the years that followed he appeared in several episodes of the FX animated series “Archer” as one of the title character’s boyhood idols, and featured in “Surge of Power” on AMC’s “Comic Book Men”, while also taking roles in the “Surge of Power” film franchise. When “Shazam! Fury of the Gods” was released in 2023, Gray made a brief cameo in which he interacted with Zachary Levi’s Captain Marvel, a nod to the original series that had made his name half a century earlier.
In his later years, Gray became a regular at fan conventions, where he reconnected with viewers who had grown up watching him. Speaking to Fanboy Planet in 2012, he said the response had surprised him. “I meet people [every day] who say, ‘You have no idea what you did for me as a child.’ ‘You helped me get through life.’ ‘You made me the better man, or woman, that I am today,’” he said. “And that’s a nice feeling. I didn’t know the show had that much strength and power back then.”
Gray is survived by his wife, Stacy Benon Gray, whom he married in 1994, his stepchildren Ryan Cooper and Laurel Cooper, and his son-in-law Lee Barker.
The original Variety post can be viewed on X: https://x.com/Variety/status/2113415371172761679.
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