He worked at many jobs, studied at the Warner Brothers acting school and began his acting career as Michael Landon, a name he said he picked from the Los Angeles telephone book. He won a track scholarship to the University of Southern California but dropped out after a year.

Though he was slight, he became a champion javelin thrower, but otherwise he was an outsider who found solace in comic books and solitary walks. His childhood was marred by parental quarrels and the anti-Semitic taunts of his schoolmates, he said in interviews. The family soon moved to the suburb of Collingswood, N.J., where he grew up. 31, 1936, in Forest Hills, Queens, to Eli Maurice Orowitz, a movie theater manager, and the former Peggy O'Neill, an actress. Landon, whose name was originally Eugene Maurice Orowitz, was born on Oct. 'It is a warm and loving and compassionate show for the whole family.' A Marred Childhood In 1984, Arthur Unger wrote in The Christian Science Monitor that 'Highway to Heaven' 'is all the things its critics will say it is: simplistic, saccharine, gushy, sentimental, ingenuous, unsophisticated.' 'But it is also unique in contemporary television,' he added. O'Connor wrote in The New York Times in 1974 that 'Little House on the Prairie' was overburdened by 'family warmth and struggle,' but he praised its historical value, citing 'the building of the small windowless log cabin the threat of wild wolf packs and prairie fires, the hunting for fox, muskrat and beaver, the diet of rabbit stew and biscuits.' The main values of 'Little House on the Prairie,' he said in 1975, 'are the little things that nobody seems to care about anymore: the simple needs of people and how difficult it was in those days out West to supply them.'

Admirers praised him for sincerity in striving to deal honestly with sentiment and social concerns and for integrity in using his own company, Michael Landon Productions, to back his shows. Landon's shows as sentimental happy-ever-after contrivances. The three NBC series, along with several television plays and 'Father Murphy,' a 1981-84 series he supervised, made him a major shaper of prime-time family fare for nearly three decades.ĭetractors assailed Mr. The actor, an athletic man with thick curly hair, played the youngest member of the Ponderosa Ranch's all-male clan in 1959 to 1973 on 'Bonanza.' He went on to play an idealized frontier father in 'Little House on the Prairie' in 1974 to 1982 and the altruistic angel assigned by God to aid mankind and spread love in 'Highway to Heaven' in 1984 to 1988.

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