Ray Danton; Child Radio Star, Later Played Villains in Films

Ray Danton, a child star on radio, a villain in films and a director in Europe, is dead at the age of 60.

His daughter-in-law, TV producer Jill Danton, said he died Tuesday at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center after a years-long battle with kidney failure.

Danton, who was 12 when he became part of Nila Mack’s young radio troupe on the popular “Let’s Pretend” children’s theater series, moved into television after infantry service in the Korean War. After being discharged from the service, he appeared on live TV shows in New York such as “Studio One” and “The Philco Playhouse” before coming to Hollywood in the early 1950s.

In films, he portrayed a renegade half-caste in the 1955 film “Chief Crazy Horse,” Susan Hayward’s first love in “I’ll Cry Tomorrow” the same year, and the title roles in “The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond” in 1960 and “The George Raft Story” in 1961.

He also was featured in “The Longest Day,” “The Chapman Report,” “Too Much, Too Soon,” and “Portrait of a Mobster,” again as Diamond in the film about yet another gangster, Dutch Schultz.

“You might say that I’m always the second-fastest gun in town,” he said in a Times interview when he was new to the industry.

He also worked on stage in the musical “110 in the Shade” (an adaptation of “The Rainmaker”) and in the title role of “Beckett” at the Pasadena Playhouse.

Danton went to Italy in the mid-1960s, ostensibly to act but instead turned to directing and from 1968 to 1975 directed 17 films for his own production company in Spain.

He came back to the United States, where Universal gave him directing assignments on such popular TV series as “Cagney & Lacey,” “Quincy,” “Dallas” and “Dynasty.” Danton was the director on the pioneering “Cagney & Lacey” segment dealing with breast cancer.

Survivors include his two sons, Steve and Mitchell, and his longtime companion, Jeannie Austin.

A memorial service is scheduled Feb. 29 at noon at the Directors Guild of America in Hollywood. Contributions in his name may be made to the Kidney Transplant Fund, 2340 Clay St., San Francisco 94115.