Marjoe Gortner, Child Preacher and ‘Earthquake,’ ‘Falcon Crest’ Actor, Dies at 82

Marjoe Gortner, the celebrity child preacher who was the subject of an Oscar-winning documentary and an actor with roles in Earthquake, When You Comin’ Back, Red Ryder? and Falcon Crest, has died. He was 82.

Gortner died Friday of complications from congestive heart failure, his family announced.

With a contract at Universal Pictures, Gortner made his onscreen acting debut as the junkie Teddy Hopper in the 1973 Joseph Sargent-directed telefilm The Marcus-Nelson Murders, which served as the pilot for the CBS crime series Kojak, starring Telly Savalas.

He had another featured role as Jody Joad, a grocery store manager turned National Guardsman, in the Mark Robson-directed disaster movie Earthquake (1974), and he played a psychopathic, hostage-taking Vietnam veteran in Milton Katselas’ When You Comin’ Back, Red Ryder? (1979).

On the sixth season (1986-87) of the CBS primetime soap opera Falcon Crest, Gortner drew on his real-life experience to portray to play Vince Karlotti, a colorful polygamist and faux psychic medium over 17 episodes.

Hugh Marjoe (a combination of Mary and Joseph) Ross Gortner was born on Jan. 14, 1944, in Long Beach, California. He spoke eloquently as a child, so his parents, Vernon, a Christian evangelical minister, and mother, Marge, had him ordained as a preacher at age 4, when he performed a marriage ceremony for a Paramount newsreel.

Now a celebrity, the long-haired Gortner delivered gyrating, dramatic sermons at revival meetings across the U.S. as his family amassed a fortune estimated to be worth $3 million, but he said his father took off with the money shortly before Gortner turned 16.

He rejoined the ministry as a way to earn a living and in 1971 granted a film crew access to him during his final revival tour. The resulting 1972 documentary, Marjoe, produced and directed by Howard Smith and Sarah Kernochan, debuted at Cannes and won the Oscar for best feature documentary. (The poster called it “a real story millions of people refuse to believe.”)

In the film, Gortner — who said he studied Mick Jagger as a model for his routine — talks about how he and other evangelists manipulated regular folks during revivals, and he’s seen in his hotel room counting the money he had collected one day.

In his review for The New York Times, Vincent Canby described the film as “less a documentary about Marjoe’s final weeks on the Pentecostal church-and-tent circuit than a feature-length screen test for a career in showbiz.”

In 1972, Gortner recorded an album, Bad, but Not Evil, which featured him singing Bob Dylan’s “I Shall Be Released” and “Lo and Behold!,” and with all this notoriety, he was signed to a contract at Universal.

Gortner also starred with Lynda Carter in Bobbie Jo and the Outlaw (1976), appeared in the daredevil biopic Viva Knievel! (1977) and toplined a low-budget space opera, Starcrash (1978).

His résumé included appearances on Barnaby Jones, Medical Center, Police Story, Laugh-In, The A-Team, Fantasy Island, Airwolf and Hotel, and he played a preacher in Wild Bill (1995), one of his final roles.

He also appeared regularly on Circus of the Stars specials in the 1980s.

Survivors include his fifth wife, Susan, whom he married in 2019. He was briefly married to American Graffiti actress Candy Clark — they starred together in When You Comin’ Back, Red Ryder? — in the late ’70s.