Rick Hurst, who portrayed the friendly but bumbling deputy sheriff Cletus Hogg on the comedy series “The Dukes of Hazzard,” died at his home in Los Angeles on Thursday. He was 79.
His death was confirmed by Alma Viator, the wife of his friend and former colleague Ben Jones, who played Cooter on “The Dukes of Hazzard.”
Mr. Hurst had been scheduled to appear at a meet-and-greet on July 3 at the Cooter’s Place in Pigeon Forge, Tenn., a shop and museum dedicated to the TV show run by Ms. Viator and Mr. Jones, but Mr. Hurst had canceled because he was not feeling well.
Ms. Viator said in a phone interview on Friday that Mr. Hurst’s death was “shocking to all of us, even though we knew he wasn’t feeling well.”
Mr. Hurst appeared as Cletus, the cousin of Boss Hogg, the commissioner of the fictional Hazzard County, in 55 episodes of “The Dukes of Hazzard” from 1979 until 1982. The show ran for seven seasons on CBS.
The show left a mark on American popular culture (most famously, perhaps, rebranding cutoff denim shorts as “Daisy Dukes” after one of its characters). Until recently, Mr. Hurst still appeared at events at Cooter’s Place, which has three locations across the South.
While Mr. Hurst earned dozens of television and movie credits over his long acting career, his first acting experience came when he was 5. Someone tapped him on the shoulder while he was at the Houston Public Library with his mother, asking him to star in a commercial for the library.
“My pay was a chocolate soda,” Mr. Hurst said in an interview with an Arkansas radio station in 2022.
Mr. Hurst earned one of his first television credits in 1972 as a police officer on “Sanford and Son,” an NBC comedy that ran from 1972 until 1978. That same year, he played another cop in another hit American sitcom, “The Partridge Family.” Mr. Hurst also made appearances on “The Doris Day Show,” “The Bob Newhart Show” and “Kojak,” among other titles.
But most of his early-career work was in commercials, he said, largely to make a living while he worked to land roles on TV shows and movies.
“There was a two-year period where I did 146 national commercials,” he said in the radio interview. He promoted many products, he said, including shaving cream, cereal, the Dodge Polara and Pillsbury rolls.
Mr. Jones, his fellow actor on “The Dukes of Hazzard,” said in a Facebook post on Thursday that he first saw Mr. Hurst in the 1975 movie “W.W. and the Dixie Dancekings,” which also starred Burt Reynolds, writing that Mr. Hurst “stole the show.”
On “The Dukes of Hazzard,” he “fit right in and never stopped making people smile,” Mr. Jones wrote.
Richard Douglas Hurst was born on Jan. 1, 1946 in Houston. He is survived by his two sons, Ryan and Collin, both actors, and a granddaughter. Ryan Hurst is most famous for his roles on the television series “Sons of Anarchy” and “The Walking Dead.”
Rick Hurst’s first stage performance was in a garage performance of “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” in Houston when he was 10 years old, he said. “I don’t remember which dwarf I was,” he said in the 2022 radio interview. “It might have been Grumpy.”
Then, in high school in Houston, he enrolled in a theater class, he said, partly because he had a crush on a girl who was also taking the class.
Mr. Hurst said he was not planning on writing a memoir about his time on “The Dukes of Hazzard,” like some of its other actors had done. But, he said, he had been doing some writing of his own.
“What I’ve been working on is some short little essays and poems,” he said. “One of these days I might surprise people and come out with a book of poetry.”
Claire Moses is a Times reporter in London, focused on coverage of breaking and trending news.
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