Leo Penn; Actor, Director, Artistic Family’s Patriarch

Leo Penn, actor and veteran television director who earned an Emmy for directing a two-hour episode of “Columbo,” has died. He was 77.

Penn, patriarch of a performing family that includes son Sean, died Saturday in Los Angeles of cancer.

Best known for directing more than 400 hours of prime-time television ranging from “Ben Casey” and “I Spy” to “Matlock,” the elder Penn acted with his wife, Eileen Ryan, in the 1995 film “Crossing Guard,” directed by middle son Sean, and in 1997 in the play “Remembrance,” produced by Sean at the Odyssey Theatre in West Los Angeles.

“It’s like getting married again, renewing your vows,” Leo Penn said of his onstage romance with his wife in that play. “It’s misleading to say it’s a geriatric ‘Romeo and Juliet,’ but it is.”

The couple’s other sons are Michael, a singer and songwriter, and Chris, who followed Sean into acting.

The parents met when they appeared in leading roles in a late-1950s Broadway production of “The Iceman Cometh.” Leo Penn also appeared in such plays as “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” “Of Mice and Men” and “School for Scandal.”

He had studied drama at UCLA and expected to teach. But when he was seen acting in a campus play, Hollywood came calling and he soon had a contract with Paramount.

The actor spent a decade from the late 1940s to the late 1950s on the Hollywood blacklist, the result of attending meetings of actors sympathetic to trade union members and occasionally speaking out at meetings in support of the Hollywood Ten.

He survived by working in television. When he returned to films in 1959, performing in “The Story on Page One,” Penn decided he was tired of acting. He got a job on the new “Ben Casey” television series, where he could learn directing.

Penn directed a couple of motion pictures, notably “A Man Called Adam,” starring Sammy Davis Jr., in 1966, and “Judgment in Berlin” in 1988, starring Martin Sheen and including a cameo by Sean. But he primarily stuck to the small screen, directing myriad movies for television and series episodes.

Among the series for which he served as a director were “Cannon,” “Barnaby Jones,” “Little House on the Prairie,” “Doctors Hospital,” “The Bionic Woman,” “Hart to Hart,” “Trapper John, M.D.,” “Magnum, P.I.,” “Cagney and Lacey,” “Remington Steele,” “In the Heat of the Night” and “Diagnosis Murder.”

Penn won his Emmy for directing the 1973 episode “Columbo, Any Port in a Storm.”

In addition to his wife and three sons, the director is survived by three grandchildren.