by Rona Barrett; Rona Barrett’s Hollywood, May 1972
SAD GOODBYES…. Hollywood lost several of its brightest faces and names, to the distress of all who love good entertainment. I came back from a sunny vacation to find that not only the beloved MAURICE CHEVALIER had left us, but also a young star with a great future ahead, PETER DUEL.
Slowly, in the days that followed PETER’s death by self-inflicted gunshot, the details of his life began to be tied together. For instance, it was decided that PETER’s part in his Alias Smith and Jones series would definitely be taken over by ROGER … Read More
by Percy Shain, Globe Staff; Boston Globe TV Week, February 14, 1971
There is something symptomatic in the name change of actor Peter Deuel to Pete Duel. The co-star of the new ABC mid-season series, Alias Smith and Jones, seems constantly in a duel with himself.
One would have thought he would be in 7th Heaven with this third crack at series stardom (after the one-year flops of Gidget and Love on a Rooftop). Instead, he says, “I have had happier periods in my life.”
Is he glad he was chosen for it? “I had no choice,” he replied. “As a player under … Read More
Letter to Tiger Talk, Tiger Beat, February 1972
I just had to write and tell you the marvelous thing Pete Duel did for this city and its people. Our local TV station had a telethon for the March of Dimes and Pete worked very hard and unselfishly for many hours to raise money for those who need it so badly. He signed autograph after autograph, and you could see how happy he was to be doing everything. Before he left, he kissed me and signed autographs for me and other lucky people. Not many stars would do something as wonderful as … Read More
Flip, February 1972
Whether you think of them as Hannibal Heyes and Kid Curry or Smith and Jones or Peter Duel and Ben Murphy, on TV, these two characters may tend to look a little alike at times. But off-screen they are two very distinct people!
There are a great many differences between Pete and Ben. For example, their homes: Pete lives in a funky old house in the Hollywood Hills, while Ben lives in an apartment with a pool in the San Fernando Valley. For Ben, it only takes about five minutes to get to Universal Studios where Alias Smith and … Read More
by Jeff Rovin, TV Babylon, Signet, New York, 1984, pp. 60-62
With a slight stretch of the imagination, the fate of some suicide victims, such as Brenda Benet, can be regarded as a happy ending. Not so the demise of Peter Duel. He wasn’t a lost and saddened figure like Brenda, didn’t have Nick Adams’s bad luck, or Inger Stevens’s fatal sense of isolation. He was simply a young man full of high ambition. Like so many actors before him, Duel’s plan had always been to suffer through the TV pap [lacking in substance] in order to make a name for … Read More
by Roma Wheaton; Forever Young (book), date unknown
Success came easily to Peter Deuel (he later dropped the first e in his surname to avoid confusion), a dark-haired, handsome young man with an engaging personality. In the mid sixties, he could be found in nearly every successful American television series.
For a short time, he even had his own sitcom, Love on a Rooftop. He cared passionately about every aspect of his life, his work and the quality of it, the world we live in and the way we abuse it. An ardent campaigner for political rights, he was a perfectionist, always … Read More
by Bridget Byrne; Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, February 27, 1970
Pete Duel wanted to talk about the problems of population and pollution, but the crowded gossip-filled atmosphere of the Hollywood Brown Derby was not the ideal place for such a discussion.
Throughout the interview, Duel, the star of that nice young movie Generation, who revealed that he was 30 that day, was restless. He looked as though he should have been sprawled out on some sea cliff kicking up the earth with the heel of his boots rather than crammed in a booth, unable to stretch.
In town to do some looping on his … Read More