Barry Morse, 89; played Lt. Gerard on 'The Fugitive'

Morse, who maintained homes in England and Canada, died Saturday at University College Hospital in London, his son, actor Hayward Morse, told the Canadian Press news agency. A cause of death was not announced.

In the 1963 series debut of "The Fugitive," Kimble is falsely accused of murdering his wife and escapes from Gerard. Kimble spends the next four years eluding the detective and hunting the one-armed man he believed was the real killer.

The finale, broadcast Aug. 29, 1967, made TV history -- the ABC show was seen by more than 72% of viewers, a record that stood until "Dallas" eclipsed it 13 years later. In the climactic scene, Gerard shoots the one-armed man to save Kimble's life.

Some viewers were so wrapped up in the melodramatic morality play that they had trouble distinguishing Morse the actor from his cop-as-villain character.

"Elderly ladies bashed me across the head with their handbags, or some hulking great man would come up to me in a bar and say: 'Don't you understand? The guy's innocent!' It was an enormous compliment -- and quite dangerous," Morse told the London Daily Mail in 1993.

He considered the part groundbreaking because the character was "carefully designed to be disliked. . . . I was the most hated man in America, and I loved it," Morse said in the Daily Mail article.

His son told the Canadian Press that his father believed "The Fugitive" was "one of the best things television had produced."

The widely syndicated show failed to provide him "one thin dime" in recent years, Morse often said, because residuals from the series ran out after five years.

Morse was born June 10, 1918, in London, and grew up poor. At 14 he left school, partly to escape beatings the left-hander said he received for refusing to write with his right hand.

While working as a messenger, Morse happened upon a public performance by students of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. The discovery led him to attend the school on scholarship from 1935 to 1937, and he was soon acting in West End theaters and appearing in British Broadcasting Corp. productions.

After moving to Canada in 1951, he was such a force on Canadian Broadcasting Corp. shows that at least one critic referred to him as "test pattern," claiming the network put him on when it had nothing else to air.