Manly actor Lee Patterson will always be remembered by American audiences as the hunky detective alongside equally hunky detectives Van Williams and Troy Donahue on Surfside 6 (1960) from the early 1960s. But, prior to that, he had a solid second-string career in British films playing Americanized parts.
Born in British Columbia, he went to a college in Ontario before crossing the ocean and settling in England. A former stage manager and theatre publicist in his salad days, he was a rock-solid presence in such "B" films as 36 Hours (1953) (aka Terror Street), Les bons meurent jeunes (1954), Vainqueur du ciel (1956), The Flying Scot (1957) (aka The Mailbag Robbery) and Jack l'éventreur (1959). The monumental success of the private eye series 77 Sunset Strip (1958) and the hair-combing Edd Byrnes "Kookie" craze instigated a number of imitations with Surfside 6 (1960) being just one of them. It lasted a rather short two seasons but it did establish Lee here in America. As good looking as the exotic locales behind him on the show, his own good looks carried him much further, going on to star in a number of guest spots and earning a slew of soap opera roles along the way, most notably on On ne vit qu'une fois (1968) as Erika Slezak's one-time husband. He grew into a reliable character actor and was also seen on the stage in later years.
Out of the limelight for quite some time, Lee remained quite private, and his death on Valentine's Day in 2007 at a Galveston Island, Texas hospital of congestive heart failure (complicated by lung cancer and emphysema) was not reported until nearly a year later. A sizable portion of his estate went to charitable organizations such as the St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, which was founded by his good friend Danny Thomas.
