Actor Michael Evans Died

British actor Michael Evans, who wooed Audrey Hepburn on Broadway in "Gigi" and was the best friend to billionaire Victor Newman on CBS's long-running "The Young and the Restless", has died. He was 87. From Latimes


Evans, who starred on Broadway with a young Audrey Hepburn in "Gigi," died Sept. 4 at a Woodland Hills assisted-living facility of complications related to age, said his son, Nick Evans.

A native of England, Evans arrived on Broadway in 1950 to play a secretive secretary in the comedy "Ring Round the Moon." A year later, he appeared as the debonair Gaston in the original Broadway production of "Gigi" that helped launch Hepburn's career.

In the late 1950s, Evans was cast as professor Henry Higgins in the national touring production of "My Fair Lady," a part he played for years. Critics noted his sharp resemblance to Rex Harrison, Broadway's original Higgins. In 1961, The Times called Evans' turn as Higgins "expert and vital."

The role remained a career highlight, partly because of the company's 1960 tour of Russia, which brought Western culture to the country at the height of the Cold War, his son said.
John Michael Evans was born July 27, 1920, in Sittingbourne, England, to the former Marie Galbraith, a concert violinist, and A.J. Evans, a World War I prisoner-of-war escapee who wrote the 1926 novel "The Escaping Club."

At 12, Evans saw John Gielgud in the Shakespeare play "Richard II," and decided that he "wanted to be an actor from then on," he told the Toronto Star in 1992.

During World War II, Evans served as a navigator for the Royal Air Force and flew during the blitz of London.

After graduating in 1943 from Winchester College in England, he studied at the Old Vic School in London and debuted on the London stage in 1948. That same year, he married Pat Wedgewood; they had two sons and divorced after 25 years.

While making the 1963 film "Bye Bye Birdie," Evans decided to move West and eventually appeared in more than 40 films and television shows.

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