‘Mission’s‘ Morris dies at age 61

Wednesday, Aug. 28, 1996 | 11:59 a.m.

Greg Morris, who as the electronics expert on "Mission: Impossible" was one of the first black actors to star in a hit television show, died Tuesday at his Las Vegas home. He was 61.

The cause of death was not immediately known, but Morris had been suffering from lung and brain cancer in recent years.

Morris played the self-effacing Barney Collier on "Mission: Impossible," which ran from 1966 to 1973. Earlier, he had appeared on "Ben Casey," "Dr. Kildare," "The Dick Van Dyke Show" and "The Twilight Zone." Later in his career, he regularly appeared in the series "Vegas."

Morris was born Sept. 27, 1934, in Cleveland and spent part of his youth in New York, where his mother was a secretary to A. Philip Randolph, the black labor leader who helped found the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters.

"I always had an awareness of the black revolution," he told the Christian Science Monitor in 1970, at the peak of his fame. "When I was a kid, 9 or 10, I used to walk down Seventh Avenue and 125th Street with a sandwich sign on my back that said 'Down With Jim Crow.'"

Morris attended Ohio State University and the University of Iowa, served in the Army for three years and worked as a wine steward before arriving in Hollywood in the early 1960s, after some minor theater work in Seattle.

In a 1979 interview with the Las Vegas SUN, Morris said he had hopes of playing basketball at the University of Iowa. But he left the team and majored in radio and TV speech. An adviser asked him to sit on a student theatre board, and he fell in love with the theatre.

He once said that his years on "Mission: Impossible" were "seven of the most fun years of my career."

"If I had turned down the role, Geller was going to ask a blond, blue-eyed Scandinavian," he said, referring to the producer Bruce Geller.

"The part had nothing to do with the fact that I am black. I was one of the first black actors in a series, but not the first. Ivan Dixon was in 'Hogan's Heroes,' and 'Cos' was in 'I Spy,"' he noted, referring to Bill Cosby.

When a new movie version of "Mission: Impossible" was released earlier this year, Morris walked out less than halfway through the film, according to the Associated Press. "It's an abomination," he said of the film, which did not use any of the cast from the television series.

Morris came to Las Vegas in 1979 to film "Vegas," in which he played Lt. David Nelson. He liked the city so much he decided to stay.

In a 1988 revival of "Mission: Impossible," his son, Phil Morris, played the same part his father had played in the original series.

Phil Morris said in a 1994 interview that his father was stubbornly battling cancer that originated in his lung and later spread to his brain. Morris said his father continued to smoke despite the disease.

Morris and his wife, Lee, were divorced last year after 38 years of marriage. He also is survived by their three children, Phil, Linda and Iona.