American actor best known for playing US Army surgeon 'Trapper' John McIntyre in the television comedy series M.A.S.H.
Wayne Rogers, who has died aged 82, played the US Army surgeon Captain “Trapper” John McIntyre, the martini-swilling, nurse-chasing sidekick to Alan Alda’s “Hawkeye” Pierce, in the immensely popular television series M.A.S.H., a black comedy set in a mobile hospital during the Korean War.
Rogers took over the role of Trapper John for the television adaptation (first broadcast in 1972) from Elliott Gould who had played him in Robert Altman’s hit film of 1970, which was itself based on a novel by Richard Hooker, a former US Army physician. For the television show, which was generally lighter in tone than the film, Trapper’s sense of humour was made broader, more slapstick and less dry.
He tended to take on a secondary role as partner in practical jokes – usually involving the goading of the more officious members of the unit such as Major Burns – to Alan Alda’s character. But the wisecracking Trapper – so-called because a young woman with whom he was once caught in flagrante in a train’s lavatory protested that “he trapped me!” – was well liked by viewers.
By the third series, Alda’s dominance in the scripts was irritating Rogers and this, as well as contractual disagreements (including a morality clause which, Rogers later claimed, “said that, in the eyes of the studio, if you behaved in an immoral fashion, they have the right to suspend you”) led to his departure from the show in 1975. Trapper was hastily written out of the script and replaced as Hawkeye’s tent chum by Captain B J Hunnicutt (Mike Farrell), who stayed for the remaining eight seasons.
William Wayne McMillan Rogers was born in Birmingham, Alabama, on April 7 1933, the son of a lawyer who died when Wayne was still a child. After private school he read History at Princeton and then served in the US Navy as a navigator on a cargo ship before catching the acting bug.
He moved to New York where he studied dance (with Martha Graham) and acting. He appeared in episodes of Gunsmoke, Law of the Plainsman and Wanted: Dead or Alive and in 1960 was cast in a lead role in a new Western series, Stagecoach West. In 1967 he took a small role in the prison drama Cool Hand Luke with Paul Newman.
Wayne Rogers
Of the M.A.S.H. years he said: “It was a wonderful experience, and I’ll tell you why. Alan Alda and I came to it with the same attitude – that the work, and not the trappings of the work, was the most important thing.”
After M.A.S.H. he turned up occasionally in films; on television among other roles he appeared as a guest star in five episodes of Murder, She Wrote and, starting in 1979, played a doctor again in the sitcom House Calls, with Lynn Redgrave and then Sharon Gless.
Meanwhile Rogers’s business career was prospering; he became a respected entrepreneur and appeared on Cashin’ In on Fox News as a pundit.
Rogers always salted away his earnings. “One of the first things I did in the early 1960s,” he remembered, “was to buy an apartment house in West Hollywood out of bankruptcy and turn it around.” In the early days he was able to help his flatmate, the actor Peter Falk, to recover money from an insurance company after he had been badly advised.
Wayne Rogers married, first, Mitzi McWhorter, an actress, in 1960. The marriage was dissolved and in 1988 he married Amy Hirsh, a producer. She survives him with a son and a daughter from the previous marriage.
Wayne Rogers, born April 7 1933, died December 31 2015
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