Christopher Jones, actor who quit at peak of career, dies at 72

As far back as 1968, rising star Christopher Jones -- who seemed to have everything at 26, including sensitive good looks, adoring fans and a steady stream of film offers -- said he wasn't much devoted to acting.

"I think of acting as only a means to an end," Jones, who was often compared to James Dean, said in a Los Angeles Times interview. "Acting's just my work."

Later that year Jones starred in the youth rebellion film "Wild in the Streets" and had a major role as a British officer in David Lean's 1970 epic "Ryan's Daughter." But he meant what he said. Except for a cameo in a friend's movie, Jones turned his back on Hollywood after the Lean film. Even as prominent a director as Quentin Tarantino was not able to lure him back onto the screen.

Jones, who continued to live in Southern California, was not much interested in explaining why he left the business at his peak. "I am happy," he told the Chicago Tribune in 2000. "I did exactly as I pleased -- within my world."

Jones, 72, died Jan. 31 at Los Alamitos Medical Center, south of Los Angeles. He was diagnosed in December with gallbladder cancer, said his partner, Paula McKenna. He had been living for the last several years with McKenna, with whom he had four children, in Seal Beach, Calif., and working occasionally as an artist.

Even after he quit the business, Jones was besieged with offers. "I was sent many scripts that I never even looked at or acknowledged," he said in a 1999 interview with the Toronto newspaper Globe and Mail. "I was too busy living and having fun."

But his former manager, Sherry Dodd, said Jones' withdrew in films after the brutal murder of actress Sharon Tate, with whom he had grown close. Tate was one of five people killed in her home by Manson family members in 1969.

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"He had a breakdown," Dodd said of Jones.

His only exception was to appear in a small part in "Trigger Happy" (1996), also known as "Mad Dog Time," at the request of director Larry Bishop, who had also appeared in "Wild in the Streets." Jones told the Globe and Mail it was "just something to do."

He was born as William Franklin Jones on Aug. 18, 1941, in Jackson, Tenn. He changed his name after going into acting, Dodd said, because it conflicted with the name of an established actor.

He eventually made his way to New York and took up painting, but he was also interested in acting, and at a casting call for the 1961 Broadway debut of Tennessee Williams' "Night of the Iguana," he was personally chosen for a small role by the playwright.

Jones' career took its first big leap when he was cast as the title character in the ABC-TV series "The Legend of Jesse James" from 1965 to 1966. He later appeared on episodes of "Judd for the Defense" and "The Man from U.N.C.L.E."