Marjoe Gortner was ordained at four and worked the Pentecostal revival circuit as a child star of the pulpit, then turned around and dismantled the business that built him in an Oscar-winning documentary. He died Oct. 2, 2026, in Santa Fe, N.M. He was 82.
His family announced the death, which was attributed to heart complications, and his wife, Susan Magestro, said he had been living with congestive heart failure for years. In a statement to Variety on Sunday, Oct. 4, Magestro said: “Marjoe lived an extraordinary life, shaped by his imagination and rare gift for bringing people together.” Sarah Kernochan, who co-directed and co-produced the 1972 documentary “Marjoe,” posted word of his death on Facebook on Saturday, Oct. 3.
A Child Preacher Made to Order
Born Hugh Marjoe Ross Gortner on Jan. 14, 1944, in Long Beach, Calif., he arrived in a family of evangelical preachers and grifters. The name fused Mary and Joseph. His parents, struck by how easily their son could hold a room, had him ordained at four, and in 1949 he performed a marriage ceremony for a Paramount newsreel. Ripley’s Believe It or Not billed him as the world’s youngest minister.
Audiences on the revival circuit knew him simply as Marjoe. He later accused his parents of forcing him, on fear of death, to deliver sermons stuffed with invented visions and miracles. By 16, he estimated, he had earned the family more than $3 million — a fortune he said his father, the preacher Vernon Gortner, later stole. He began preaching at three and a half years old, he said in the documentary. “I can’t really think of a time that I ever believed in God or in you know, ever thought that was a miracle of God that I preached,” he said.
The Documentary That Blew the Whistle
By his late teens he had privately renounced the grifting life. He drifted back to evangelism in his 20s, soured on the movement and landed in New York as an aspiring actor. In 1971 he invited documentarians Howard Smith and Kernochan to follow what he said would be his final revival tour, a decision driven partly by a wish to publicize the acting career he was chasing.
“Marjoe” traced his childhood as a Pentecostal preacher in the American South and laid bare the techniques used to bilk believers out of their money. It won the Academy Award for best documentary feature. Describing the crowds who were certain God had called him, Gortner said in the documentary: “I just knew that I could do it well and my parents had trained me.” New York Times critic Vincent Canby read the film as something closer to an extended audition, and that is how Gortner used it.
From Sensurround to “Falcon Crest”
A record, “Bad, but Not Evil,” arrived in 1972, along with guest spots on “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson,” “The Mike Douglas Show” and “The Merv Griffin Show.” He took an acting job in 1973 in the TV movie “The Marcus-Nelson Murders,” the pilot for “Kojak.” The breakthrough came a year later in Mark Robson’s disaster epic “Earthquake,” with Gortner as Sgt. Jody Joad, a grocery store manager turned National Guardsman who stalks a woman played by Victoria Principal. It was the first film to use Sensurround, the system that set cinema seats shaking, and it drew dismal reviews and big box office anyway.
Handsome, charismatic and topped with a mop of curly dark-blond hair, he made a career of crazed drug dealers, outlaws, fake psychics and preachers across 15 feature films and more than 20 TV series. His credits included “Food of the Gods,” “Acapulco Gold,” “Bobbie Jo and the Outlaw,” “Viva Knievel!,” “Starcrash” and “The Survivalist.” In 1979 he starred as a troubled Vietnam veteran who terrorizes a diner full of strangers in Milton Katselas’ screen version of Mark Medoff’s play “When You Comin’ Back, Red Ryder?”
He worked steadily in television, turning up on “Medical Center,” “Barnaby Jones,” “Police Story,” “Airwolf,” “T.J. Hooker,” “Street Hawk,” “Otherworld,” “The A-Team,” and “Fantasy Island,” and in the TV movies “Pray for the Wildcats,” and “The Gun and the Pulpit.” In 1980 he briefly hosted the topical talk show “Speak Up America” with Jayne Kennedy and Rhonda Bates. His most pointed casting came in 1986-87, when “Falcon Crest” cast him as the corrupt psychic Vince Karlotti for 17 episodes.
Charity Events and Later Years
Off camera, Gortner produced the Marjoe Gortner celebrity sports invitationals, a fixture of CBS Saturdays for years that raised millions of dollars for charity. Actor Ian Ziering credited him with shepherding celebrities around the world for those events and with raising enormous sums for a range of causes. He retired from acting after Walter Hill’s “Wild Bill” in 1995 and sometimes appeared as a guest at autograph shows; his final film role has since been reported as the 1999 film “The Debtors.” The documentary that made his name was long considered lost, until its negative was found in a New York vault in 2002.
Gortner married five times, among them a marriage to Candy Clark, his “Red Ryder” co-star, whom he divorced in 1979. He married Magestro in 2019, and she survives him. Victoria Principal, who met him on the set of “Earthquake,” remembered him in a Facebook post: “He was complicated, generous & kind.” “We met in 1973 while we were making Earthquake,” she wrote, and, in a separate passage: “It’s because of Marjoe that I discovered the freedom of moving out of Hollywood to Malibu. I hope he is at peace now.”
