Michael Gray, the actor who played Billy Batson on Shazam! and helped define one of television’s better-known Saturday morning transformations, died Friday in Palm Desert of natural causes. He was 75.
Gray’s death closes the book on the original kid hero of Shazam!, the CBS series that ran for three seasons from 1974 to 1976 and made him familiar to viewers who watched Billy Batson yell the word shazam and become Captain Marvel. For a generation that knew him first as a teen idol, his face was as likely to turn up in Tiger Beat as on television, and Gray said that was exactly the point: he was pushed as the next David Cassidy and, for a time, it worked.
He was born in Chicago on Sept. 2, 1951, raised in Miami Beach and headed to Hollywood to study acting at Pasadena Playhouse. His first onscreen credit came in 1969 on Room 222, followed by appearances on The Flying Nun, Marcus Welby, M.D. and The Brady Bunch, where he played Marcia’s boyfriend in 1973. He also appeared with Burt Reynolds in the ABC telefilm Run, Simon, Run in 1970 and turned up in Beyond the Valley of the Dolls and Myra Breckinridge. Before Shazam!, his first series role was as student doctor Ronnie Collins on The Little People, which aired on NBC from 1972 to 1974.
Gray later said he had to be a quick study when he was cast in Shazam!, because he did not know the character or the story when the role came to him. He also recalled that the production briefly experimented with a flash effect for the Billy-to-Captain Marvel change before dropping it quickly. On the fan-magazine side of fame, he said he was often on the cover of Tiger Beat and that, when the coverage was at its peak, he could not leave his house. “It got pretty ugly sometimes,” he said.
That kind of attention helped make him recognizable, but it also helped push him away from acting. Gray later quit because he felt he was getting typecast, then moved into children's theater education, men's fashion and a West Hollywood floral business with his wife, Stacy. The release of Shazam! on DVD in 2012 brought him back to fan conventions, and Gray said he was still fielding questions about the show “10 times a week.” His cameo in Shazam! Fury of the Gods in 2023 briefly linked the old series to a newer screen generation, but his place in the franchise had already been fixed: he was the Billy Batson audiences remember first, and now one of the last remaining faces from that era is gone.
