James Stacy hit the big time in the early 1960s TV western Lancer.
Stacy (Born Maurice William Elias in Los Angeles.) was the second child of three siblings, who grew up in a working-class family, the son of a Lebanese bookmaker. His American-born mother, Lois, was Irish-Scottish was a waitress.
Stacy attended Glendale Community College for a while but dropped out to pursue a career in the Canadian Football League. He played for the British Columbia Lions, but the team cut him after just two months.
Then he turned to acting and kicked around Hollywood for quite a while. He made his film debut in Sayonara in 1957, and his television debut on Highway Patrol and then landed a recurring role as Fred in The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet from 1958 to 1963. Between that, there were dozens of guest appearances in television shows, including Gunsmoke, Hazel, The Donna Reed Show, Have Gun - Will Travel, Combat!, and Perry Mason in the 1964 episode 'The Case of the Simple Simon' and the series finale "The Case of the Final Fade-out" in 1966.
But it was Lancer that made him a household name. Lancer aired on CBS from 1968 to 1970 and cast Stacy as the character "Johnny Madrid Lancer", a former gunslinger, the son of Duggan's character, Murdoch Lancer.
On September 27, 1973, Stacy was taking his girlfriend Claire Cox for a ride on his motorcycle in the Hollywood Hills along Benedict Canyon Road when a drunken driver struck them. Cox was killed and Stacy lost his left arm and leg.
Connie Stevens, his ex-wife (He had also married and divorced actress Kim Darby) organized a 1974 celebrity gala to raise money for his expenses and collected $118,000 (About $600,000 today) for his expenses. Stacy later won a $1.9 million lawsuit ($8.4 million today) against the bar that had served the drunk driver.
Stacy spent three months recuperating in the hospital, followed by years of learning to adapt physically and emotionally to his new life as a double-amputee. After his recovery, Stacy returned to acting in the 1975 Kirk Douglas Western, Posse, in which he was cast as newspaper editor "Harold Hellman", a part Douglas had written for him. After that he worked steadily, mostly in television up until the 1990s.
In November 1995, Stacy pleaded no contest to a charge of molesting an 11-year-old daughter of a friend after he had invited her to his home in Ojai, California, for a swim and fondled her genitals.
Arrested, he failed to appear for sentencing in Ventura County Superior Court and was arrested the next day in a Honolulu, Hawaii, hospital after having fled California. He attempted suicide by jumping off a 1200 foot cliff. After recovering, (He fell only 45 feet because he tripped on a rock while jumping) Stacy waived extradition and returned to California.
Stacy, who was an alcoholic, was sentenced to a six-year prison sentence, oddly enough he would have been given probation had he not fled. But there were other arrests as well.
In 1981, Stacy was fined $750 and ordered to carry out 250 hours of community service after he broke a waitress’ nose at a La Quinta hotel bar near Palm Springs. The waitress, Sheryl Taffolla brought Stacy the wrong bar bill. He refused to pay. When she insisted, Stacy punched her. At the time he was the Chairman of Californians for Sober Highways.
A few days later, a drunk and belligerent Stacy refused to leave a discotheque at 1:30 in the morning, punched another waitress and wrestled with a security guard to the ground. When the police searched him, they found unprescribed valium in pocket. Even though he failed to appear in court on the original assault charge and was rearrested, he was put on probation and banned from drinking and being at places that even served alcohol.
In June of 1995, he was arrested twice for prowling at the homes of other underaged girls. (12 and 16) who had moved in next door to him. Stacy wheeled himself outside their house and drunkenly yelled into their door, “Come talk to me, I know you’re in there!”
A week later, Stacy accosted the 10 and 11-year-old daughters of a local schoolteacher in their backyard. He was arrested, and following a psychologist’s diagnosis, confirmed to be a pedophile.
He died on September 9, 2016, at the age of 79, of anaphylactic shock as a result of a an antibiotic injection