Mike Connors (born August 15, 1925) is an American actor best known for playing detective Joe Mannix in the long-running CBS television series, Mannix. Before that, he had played a crime-fighting investigator, wielding a .38 handgun hidden in his back, in another CBS series Tightrope.
Born Krikor Ohanian in Fresno, California, of Armenian descent, he graduated from University of California at Los Angeles, where he was a member of the Phi Delta Th...
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Mike Connors (born August 15, 1925) is an American actor best known for playing detective Joe Mannix in the long-running CBS television series, Mannix. Before that, he had played a crime-fighting investigator, wielding a .38 handgun hidden in his back, in another CBS series Tightrope.
Born Krikor Ohanian in Fresno, California, of Armenian descent, he graduated from University of California at Los Angeles, where he was a member of the Phi Delta Theta fraternity. An avid basketball player who was nicknamed "Touch" by his teammates, he is credited in his early films, such as Island in the Sky (1953), Swamp Women, a.k.a. Swamp Diamonds, Five Guns West (1955), and Flesh and the Spur (1957) as Touch Connors.
He played basketball for Coach John Wooden at UCLA.
Connors recalled in an interview that he was renamed by Henry Willson saying that "Ohanian" was too close to the actor George "O'Hanlon" and came up with "Touch Connors".
In 1956, still billed as Touch Connors, he played an Amalekite...
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