Gidget actor James Darren dies aged 88 after six-decade career

US actor James Darren, who starred in the 1959 surf movie Gidget which ignited the surfing craze of the 1960s, has died aged 88.

He died in his sleep at a Los Angeles hospital on Monday, his son Jim Moret confirmed.

Moret told The Hollywood Reporter his father had scheduled surgery for an aortic valve replacement, but doctors decided he was too weak.

“I always thought he would pull through because he was so cool. He was always cool,” his son said.

Throughout a career spanning six decades, Darren appeared in TV programmes such as Melrose Place, Star Trek, Deep Space Nine, The Love Boat, Hawaii Five-O, Fantasy Island and alongside William Shatner in TJ Hooker in the 1980s.

While appearing on the show, Darren noticed no director was listed for an upcoming sequence and asked if he could try out for it.

“When it was shown, I got several offers to direct,” he told the New York Daily News. “Soon I was getting so many offers to direct, I kind of gave up acting and singing.”

He went on to direct episodes for shows including Beverly Hills 90210 and Melrose Place.

But to movie fans of the 1950s, Gidget was his masterpiece in the role of Moondoggie, the dark-haired surfer boy in the smash film that made surfing mainstream.

He was also the only cast member who appeared in both its sequels, 1961’s Gidget Goes Hawaiian and 1963’s Gidget Goes to Rome.

By the mid-1960s, his career on the silver screen was over except for a handful of movies in the decades that followed, last appearing in 2017’s Lucky directed by John Carroll Lynch.

Born James Ercolani in 1936, he grew up in South Philadelphia. Singing came easy to him, and at 14 he was appearing in local nightclubs.

“From the age of five or six I knew I wanted to be an entertainer, or famous maybe,” he said in a 2003 interview with News-Press.

He noted that such luminaries as Eddie Fisher and Al Martino had lived in the same area as he did, “a real neighbourhood. It made you feel you could be successful, too”.

According to a 1958 Los Angeles Times profile, he got a break when he went to New York to get some pictures taken and the photographer’s office put him in touch with a talent scout.

He was soon signed by Columbia Pictures and the newspaper said that after a few appearances, his fan mail at the studio was running “second only to Kim Novak’s. … The studio now feels that the young man is ready to hit the jackpot.”

He stayed on at the studio as a contract player.

Darren married his first wife Gloria in 1955 and had a son, Moret, an Inside Edition correspondent and former CNN anchorman.

They divorced in 1959, after which he married Evy Norlund, who came to the US as the Danish entry in the Miss Universe contest.

They had two sons, Christian and Anthony.

He was also the godfather of Nancy Sinatra’s daughter AJ Lambert.

Sinatra, daughter of Frank Sinatra, shared Darren’s obituary on her X account, formerly known as Twitter, with a broken heart emoji as a tribute.