Ron Ely: Star of TV's 'Tarzan' dies aged 86 after a life of career success and family heartbreak

Ron Ely, the tall, muscle-bound actor who played the title character in the 1960s TV series Tarzan, has died at age 86.

Ely’s daughter, Kirsten Casale Ely, told The Associated Press on Wednesday that her father died on September 29 at his home in Los Alamos, California.

While Ron Ely was not quite as well-known as Johnny Weismuller, the Olympic swimmer who played Tarzan in movies in the 1930s and 1940s, Ely helped form the image of the shirtless, loincloth-wearing character further immortalised by Disney.

In 2019, he tragically returned to the news when his 62-year-old wife, Valerie Lundeen Ely, was stabbed to death at their Santa Barbara, California, home by their 30-year-old son, Cameron Ely, who was subsequently shot and killed by police. Ron Ely, who was home during the stabbing, challenged the prosecutor’s report that his son’s shooting was justified.

In the early 1980s, Ely was host of the Miss America pageant and met Valerie, a Miss Florida, there. They married in 1984. The couple had three children, and Ely retired from acting to focus on his family in 2001.

“Late in life I had a young family. I decided to stop acting and work at home, as an author, that way I could be with the kids all through school and be able to attend their sports games and things,” he told London’s Daily Express in 2013, expressing interest in the time at re-entering acting. He would return briefly in the 2014 TV movie “Expecting Amish.”

Ely’s Tarzan didn’t speak in the monosyllabic grunts often associated with the character, originally created by novelist Edgar Rice Burroughs. He was instead an educated bachelor who had grown sick of civilisation and had returned to African jungle where he was raised.

Ely said in interviews that he did his own stunts on the show, working directly and precariously with the tigers, chimpanzees and other wild animals that were Tarzan’s friends and servants.

“They first tried to cast a former American football player called Mike Henry but he didn’t like chimpanzees and from the moment he got on set, things went south in a hurry,” Ely told London’s Daily Express in 2013.

A chimp attacked Henry and injured his jaw when the show’s pilot was being filmed, and Ely was cast in his place at the last moment.

“I met with them on a Monday and when they offered me the role I thought: ‘No way do I want to step into that bear trap. You do Tarzan and you are stamped for life’,” Ely told the Daily Express.

“Was I ever right! But my agent convinced me it was a quality show and was going to work. So on the Friday I was on a plane to Brazil to shoot the first episode.”

Ely also played the title character in the 1975 action film Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze, but otherwise had mostly small roles in TV and films, including the 1958 movie musical South Pacific.

He also wrote a pair of mystery novels featuring a detective named Jake Sands, 1994’s Night Shadows and 1995’s East Beach.

Born in Hereford, Texas, and raised in Amarillo, he married his high school sweetheart in 1959, but divorced two years later.

Along with Kirsten Casale Ely, he is survived by daughter Kaitland Ely Sweet.