Dean Stockwell, who began his seven-decade acting career as a child in the 1940s and later starred as the cigar-smoking Al Calavicci in the science fiction TV series “Quantum Leap,” died on Sunday at his home.
His parents divorced when he was 6, and he spent most of his childhood with his mother, a vaudeville comedian, and his brother, also an actor.
He would appear in 19 films before he turned 16, at which point he quit acting for the first time.
After graduating from high school at 16 — as a child actor, he received three hours of schooling while working — he realized he had little training to do anything else.
“My career was doing well, but I wasn’t getting anything out of it personally,” he told The New York Times in 1988.
After a few years off, he returned to acting only to learn that his time away had led Hollywood casting agents to forget him.
In the early 1980s, he quit acting again, moving to Santa Fe, N.M., to sell real estate.
O’Connor described Mr. Stockwell as “Mr. Bakula’s indispensable co-star.” Clutching a cigar and sporting “a wardrobe of odd punk-western outfits,” Mr. Stockwell portrayed Adm.
But as you live your life, you compile so many millions of experiences and bits of information that you become a richer vessel as a person.