Denny Miller, who played Tarzan, dies in Las Vegas

Actor Denny Miller, whose big- and small-screen roles ranged from Tarzan to the Gorton’s fisherman, died Tuesday at his Las Vegas home after battling ALS. He was 80.

Miller was diagnosed in January with the neurodegenerative disease ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease — and the inspiration for the recent Ice Bucket Challenge campaign.

It was a cruel irony for an actor, and former UCLA basketball player, devoted to physical fitness.

Even after his ALS diagnosis, “all the doctors and nurses who saw him said he was the strongest ALS patient they’d ever had,” said Miller’s wife Nancy. “Two years ago, he still looked like he was 50.”

A 12-year Las Vegas resident, Miller had a weight room in his garage that bore the sign “Miller’s Body Shop,” which helped him maintain the strapping physique that led to his showbiz breakthrough in a 1959 “Tarzan, the Ape Man” remake.

Born April 25, 1934, in Bloomington, Ind., where his father taught physical education at Indiana University, Miller began playing basketball in his boyhood — and wound up at UCLA playing for legendary coach John Wooden.

Working as a mover during summer vacation, the muscular Miller caught the eye of a talent agent and wound up playing Tarzan, billed as “MGM’s sensational new young star!”

Miller only played the Lord of the Jungle once. (The studio had rights or three Tarzan movies, “but the one I did was so bad they didn’t do the other two,” Miller joked in a 2007 Review-Journal interview.)

Yet he remained Tarzan for the rest of his life, as a card-carrying member of what he jokingly called the PTA: the Past Tarzans Association.

Miller was a regular at festivals celebrating his past roles — including, but not restricted to, Tarzan.

Fans of TV Westerns could meet and greet the strapping 6-foot-3 Duke Shannon, the role Miller played on TV’s “Wagon Train.”

During the show’s long run, his billing evolved from Denny Miller to Denny Scott Miller to Scott Miller, a process that inspired an amusing chapter in his 2004 memoir “Didn’t You Used to Be What’s His Name?” (Miller’s second book — 2006’s “Toxic Waist: Get to Know Sweat!” — focused on America’s obesity epidemic.)

Miller was a panelist last year at the Clark County Library’s Spring Fling book fair, but stopped attending festivals in September 2013, preferring to keep his illness private, Nancy Miller said.

“He maintained his dignity and grace,” she commented. “Once he was diagnosed, we tried to make every minute count.”

During his almost 50-year acting career, Miller appeared on the big screen with such stars as Sidney Poitier, Peter Sellers and Charles Bronson. He also guest starred on dozens of TV series, from “Gilligan’s Island” (where he spoofed his Tarzan past as Tongo the Ape Man) to “Gunsmoke,” “The Rockford Files” and “Vega$.”

One of the most memorable, Miller told the Review-Journal, was an “Incredible Hulk” episode in which he played a paraplegic who told the hospitalized David Banner (series star Bill Bixby), “Just ‘cause you can’t walk, life doesn’t stop — it just changes. How it changes is up to you.”

But Miller’s longest-running TV role came in commercials where he pitched frozen seafood for 14 years as the trustworthy Gorton’s fisherman. (When Gorton’s hired Miller — who had spent the previous 10 years as the brawny image of Brawny paper towels — the company’s packaging featured a clean-shaven fisherman, but that changed when Miller declined to shave his beard.)

When Nancy Miller called to inform Gorton’s of her husband’s death, the company’s chief operating officer told her “Denny was the best fisherman they’d ever had.”

Contact reporter Carol Cling at ccling@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0272.