Not a lot became of him, to be honest, but that likely didn't bother Van Williams too much as he'd made quite a lot of himself beforehand.

Williams was already living pretty comfortably in Hawaii when the acting bug bit in the 1950s. He moved to L.A. to give it a shot, but also continued to pursue various side business ventures, which over the years have included a small telecommunications company and ranching.

His early roles included a starring turn in the 1960 cop show "Bourbon Street Beat," and then a very '60s detective series called "Surfside 6," about three private eyes who work out of a houseboat in Miami.

Both of those shows ran for longer than "The Green Hornet," yet that's where Williams found his fame. He was canny enough to realize that the show's biggest draw, though, was his co-star, Bruce Lee. As the story goes he was forever demanding that producers give the young martial artist more screen time. But it was all for naught and the show was yanked before the end of its first season.

Williams then bounced around L.A. in the '70s, doing guest spots on a long list of notable series, such as "Gunsmoke," "Mission: Impossible" and, at the end of the decade, "The Rockford Files."

A cute bit of trivia: that "Rockford" spot in 1979 was his last acting role until 1993, when he did a brief unheralded turn as a director of a "Green Hornet" episode being dramatized in "Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story."

He's since gone back to Hawaii and ranching. In a 1988 interview with People magazine he said, "I don't miss show business at all ... I felt like a monkey in the zoo. There was absolutely no privacy."

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