‘Impossible’ to Forget…Peter Graves

For many decades, Mission: Impossible star Peter Graves and Pacific Palisades were inseparable.

He and wife Joan attended myriad community and Chamber of Commerce events, from Pacific Palisades’ yearly Fourth of July parade to annual Installation Dinners at the Riviera Country Club. It seems “impossible” that the Palisades is continuing without him…and yet…

It was only a year ago on March 14 that Graves died suddenly of a heart attack outside of his Santa Monica Canyon home, shortly after celebrating at a restaurant with his family…just a few days shy of his 84th birthday (March 18). The timing of Graves’s death was bittersweet: only a half year prior, on October 30, 2009, the veteran actor had finally received his long-overdue, well-earned star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Graves had died on a Sunday, and on the following Friday, March 19, a funeral service was held at St. Matthew's Church, where family such as the Graveses’ daughters––Kelly Jean McCalsin, Claudia King and Amanda Graves––and their grandchildren, as well as Graves’ manager, Sandy Brokaw, his former Mission: Impossible colleagues, and superstar Tom Hanks gathered in tribute. The service was followed by a reception/remembrance at Bel-Air Bay Club, where his Mission co-stars on the popular 1960s TV espionage series, Martin Landau and Peter Lupus, and Mike Connors (who played TV’s Mannix) mingled with family and friends of the man best known as James Phelps on the hit TV show.

Normally associated with the dramatis personae, Graves, of course, enjoyed a small role in the seminal Robert Mitchum thriller Night of the Hunter in 1955. By the dawn of the 1980s, Graves had enjoyed a late-career comeback and makeover after playing a daffy captain in the zany Zucker Brothers film Airplane! (Would you believe, by many accounts, Graves initially rejected the script upon first read and almost turned down the role?)

Married for nearly 60 years, Peter and Joan Graves were dedicated Palisadians since relocating to Los Angeles in 1949 from their native Minnesota to join James Arness (Graves’s brother), an actor who played in Westerns and who was already situated in the Palisades. Peter and Joan moved here, too, and, like many of the community's famous residents, Graves even served as Honorary Mayor of Pacific Palisades in 1969.

Correction: It was Mike Connors, not Mike Collins, who played a detective in the 1967 TV series Mannix.