Ken Kercheval

If there’s a day for the dead to return to life, it’s Easter Sunday. If there’s a TV show where a dead character should return to life, it’s Dallas. And it looked like Ken Kercheval had the double for a while there, before ruining it all by actually being dead. The Dallas star, who played oil tycoon Cliff Barnes throughout the show’s entire 12-year original run, was declared dead in his local newspaper, only for overly credulous Dallas fan pages on Facebook and Twitter to fall for a “he’s still alive” hoax perpetrated by a man claiming to be Kercheval’s son.

In the mid 1980s, Kercheval bought a share of the Old Capital Popcorn Company, which was rebranded to add his face to the packaging. However, when sales went south, his business partner Edward Phillips drove his truck onto the Dallas set and started shooting indiscriminately at extras, before turning the gun on himself. It’s widely believed he was there to kill Kercheval, who wasn’t on set that day because of a hangover.

Ken Kercheval
July 15, 1935 – April 21, 2019
Died aged 83