Your Death, Should You Choose To Accept It

Peter Graves, best known for his portrayal of group leader Jim Phelps from Mission: Impossible, died Sunday. Graves died of an apparent heart attack outside his Los Angeles home, and would have been 84 this week. That's worse than the tape self-destructing.

Graves had just returned from brunch with his wife and kids and collapsed before he made it into the house. One of his daughters administered CPR but was unable to revive him. He never achieved the stardom his older brother, James Arness (Marshal Matt Dillon on TV's Gunsmoke), though he appeared in dozens of films and a handful of television shows in a career spanning nearly 60 years. To me, he'll always be Clarence Oveur from Airplane!.

Filmmakers Jim Abrahams and David and Jerry Zucker had written a satire on the airplane-in-trouble movies, and they wanted Graves and fellow handsome actors Lloyd Bridges, Leslie Nielsen and Robert Stack to spoof their serious images. All agreed, but Graves admitted to nervousness.

On the one hand, he said, he considered the role a challenge, "but it also scared me." "I thought I could lose a whole long acting career," he recalled. Airplane! became a box-office smash, and Graves returned for Airplane II, The Sequel.

Of course, some of the best lines of the film where his...