Robert Reed

Robert Reed, born John Robert Rietz Jr., was an American actor who played Kenneth Preston on the legal drama The Defenders (1961) and Lieutenant Adam Tobias for the entire six-year run of Mannix (1967), but is beloved by generations as Mike Brady -- the patient, loving architect father -- on The Brady Bunch (1969). He earned three Primetime Emmy nominations, for a two-part Medical Center guest role and the miniseries Rich Man, Poor Man (both 1976) and for Roots (1977), and later appeared in the miniseries Scruples (1980). He was gay and deeply closeted throughout his career; the discovery of his homosexuality and his HIV status was made public only after his death from colon cancer -- complications of HIV -- in 1992. Biographers and colleagues later described a man who found the show's cheerful, wholesome heterosexual family values personally painful to perform given the life he was required to conceal, and who resented the show's creative limitations even as it made him famous.