Michael Blodgett

Michael Blodgett was an American actor who later wrote novels and screenplays. Raised in Minneapolis, he studied at the University of Minnesota, then moved to Los Angeles, where he broke into television as emcee of The Groovy Show in 1967 and later hosted The Michael Blodgett Show on KTTV. He became best known for playing the gigolo Lance Rocke in Russ Meyer's Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970), and he went on to appear in the Western There Was a Crooked Man... (1970), with Kirk Douglas and Henry Fonda, and in The Velvet Vampire. Guest spots followed on television shows such as Barnaby Jones and The Secrets of Isis. After his last film, Disco Fever, in 1978, he turned to writing, publishing the novels Captain Blood and Hero and the Terror in 1982 and The White Raven in 1986, and, with Dennis Shryack, writing screenplays for Rent-A-Cop, Turner & Hooch, and Run (1991). He died in 2007.