Ron Ely, TV’s Tarzan in the 1960s, dies aged 86

American actor Ron Ely, the 6ft4 (1m93) musclebound performer who played the title character in the 1960s NBC series Tarzan, has died aged 86. 

While Ron Ely was not 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 immortalized by Disney.

The actor died at his home in Los Alamos in Santa Barbara, California on 29 September. Announcing the death in an Instagram post yesterday, the actor’s daughter, Kirtsen Ely, said: “My father was someone that people called a hero. He was an actor, writer, coach, mentor, family man and leader.” 

“He created a powerful wave of positive influence wherever he went. The impact he had on others is something that I have never witnessed in any other person – there was something truly magical about him.”

She added: “I knew him as my dad – and what a heaven sent honour that has been. To me, he hung the moon.” 

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 civilization and had returned to African jungle where he was raised.

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.” 

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 the police.

Ron Ely, who was home during the stabbing, challenged the prosecutor’s report that his son’s shooting was justified.

“If he didn’t have a gun or he didn’t have a weapon, what was the basis of shooting him?” Ely’s attorney John Burris said in 2020. “They may have very well thought he was involved in some other activity involving the mom. But that’s not a basis to shoot and kill him. You have to have a lawful basis to do that.”

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 reentering acting.

He would return briefly in the 2014 TV movie Expecting Amish.

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