6 Things You Didn’t Know About Michael Landon

Published: June 20, 2026

By Movieguide® Staff

The Michael Landon most people know was Pa Ingalls on LITTLE HOUSE ON THE PRAIRIE and Little Joe Cartwright on BONANZA — the steady, dependable face of American family television for three decades straight.

“I believe in God, I believe in family, I believe in truth between people, I believe in the power of love, I believe that we really are created in God’s image, that there is God in all of us,” he told the Associated Press in May 1991, three months before his death from pancreatic cancer at age 54. He said it while dying, and he meant every word. These six facts tell you who was behind the name.

1. He wasn’t born Michael Landon. Born Eugene Maurice Orowitz on Oct. 31, 1936, in Queens, New York, he grew up in Collingswood, New Jersey — one of two Jewish families in a working-class town. He later told an interviewer he never dated in high school because no Christian father in town would allow his daughter to go out with a Jew.

A talent agent suggested he find a new name. He opened a telephone directory, found “Michael Landon” and kept it for the rest of his life.

2. Before Hollywood, he threw javelins. His 193-foot, 4-inch toss in 1954 was the longest by any high schooler in the country that year, earning him an athletic scholarship to USC. He tore his shoulder ligaments, ended his athletic career and eventually landed at a gas station across from Warner Bros. studios in Burbank — where a different talent agent finally noticed him.

3. On BONANZA, Landon wore four-inch shoe lifts for all 14 seasons as Little Joe Cartwright while his co-stars wore hairpieces; he quietly dyed his hair throughout the run to hide prematurely graying curls. He received more fan mail than any other cast member and eventually negotiated the right to write and direct his own episodes. By the show’s sixth season, BONANZA hit number one in the Nielsen ratings and held it for three years.

4. He appeared on the cover of TV Guide 22 times — second only to Lucille Ball. For a man who spent his career making deliberately family-friendly primetime television, that’s a genuinely remarkable tally.

5. HIGHWAY TO HEAVEN came from a promise he made to God. When Landon’s daughter Cheryl was in a coma after a serious car crash near Tucson, Arizona, in 1973 — the sole survivor among the passengers — he struck a bargain at her bedside: if she recovered, he would create something to help people.

She recovered. A decade later, HIGHWAY TO HEAVEN premiered on NBC, with Landon starring as Jonathan Smith, a probationary angel earning his wings by helping strangers. It was the only show in his long career that he ever owned outright.

6. He died on July 1, 1991, in Malibu, California, with his wife at his bedside. He is interred at Hillside Memorial Park Cemetery in Culver City. His headstone reads: “He seized life with joy. He gave to life generously. He leaves a legacy of love and laughter.”

Movieguide® has followed Landon’s legacy for years, from his own faith-informed storytelling to the work of his son Michael Landon Jr., who created WHEN CALLS THE HEART and continues to make television his father would have recognized.

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