Marjoe Gortner, who was ordained at four, worked the Pentecostal revival circuit as a child star of the pulpit and then dismantled the business that built him in an Oscar-winning documentary, died Oct. 2, 2026, in Santa Fe, N.M. He was 82.
His family announced the death, which was attributed to heart complications. His wife, Susan Magestro, said he had been living with congestive heart failure for years. Sarah Kernochan, who co-directed and co-produced the 1972 documentary “Marjoe,” announced his death in a Facebook post Saturday, Oct. 3.
A Child Preacher Built to Order
He was born Hugh Marjoe Ross Gortner on Jan. 14, 1944, in Long Beach, Calif., into a family of evangelical preachers and grifters. The name was a portmanteau of Mary and Joseph. After his parents noticed how fluently their son could hold a room, they 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.
On the revival circuit he was known simply as Marjoe. He would later accuse his parents of forcing him to deliver sermons stuffed with invented visions and miracles, and of doing so on fear of death. By 16, he estimated, he had earned the family more than $3 million. That fortune, he said, was later stolen by his father, the preacher Vernon Gortner.
The Film That Blew the Whistle
By his late teens he had privately renounced the grifting life. In his 20s he drifted back to evangelism, grew disillusioned with 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 he made partly 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. “I just knew that I could do it well and my parents had trained me,” Gortner said in the documentary, describing the crowds who were certain God had called him. New York Times critic Vincent Canby read the film as something closer to an extended audition, and Gortner used it that way.
From Sensurround to “Falcon Crest”
He released a record, “Bad, but Not Evil,” in 1972, guested on “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson,” “The Mike Douglas Show” and “The Merv Griffin Show,” and in 1973 took an acting job in the TV movie “The Marcus-Nelson Murders,” the pilot for “Kojak.” His breakthrough came the following year in Mark Robson’s disaster epic “Earthquake,” where he played Sgt. Jody Joad, a grocery store manager turned National Guardsman who stalks a woman played by Victoria Principal. The film was the first to use Sensurround, the system that set cinema seats shaking, and it was a box office hit despite dismal reviews.
Charismatic, handsome and topped with a mop of curly dark-blond hair, Gortner built a career out of crazed drug dealers, outlaws, fake psychics and preachers across 15 feature films and more than 20 TV series. He appeared in “Food of the Gods,” “Acapulco Gold,” “Bobbie Jo and the Outlaw,” “Viva Knievel!,” “Starcrash” and “The Survivalist,” and in 1979 starred in the film adaptation of Mark Medoff’s play “When You Comin’ Back, Red Ryder?,” directed by Milton Katselas, as a troubled Vietnam veteran who terrorizes a diner full of strangers. On television he turned 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.” He briefly hosted the topical talk show “Speak Up America” in 1980 with Jayne Kennedy and Rhonda Bates. His most pointed casting came in 1986-87, when he played the corrupt psychic Vince Karlotti in 17 episodes of “Falcon Crest.”
Charity Work and Later Years
Away from the camera, Gortner produced the Marjoe Gortner celebrity sports invitationals, which aired on CBS Saturdays for years and 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. Gortner retired from acting after Walter Hill’s “Wild Bill” in 1995 and was sometimes a guest at autograph shows. The documentary that made his name, meanwhile, was long considered lost until its negative was found in a New York vault in 2002.
He was married five times, including 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.”
