Michael Gray quit acting, sold flowers for years, and only learned decades later, at convention tables, how many childhoods his one television role had carried.
A generation of Saturday-morning viewers knew him as the teenager who had only to shout one word to turn into a superhero.
Michael Gray, the actor who played Billy Batson on the live-action CBS series “Shazam!,” died Friday, Oct. 16, 2026, in Palm Desert, Calif., of natural causes. He was 75.
A family spokesperson announced the death. Representatives confirmed the death to Variety on Thursday, Oct. 22.
Gray played Billy for three seasons on the CBS Saturday-morning lineup, from September 1974 to October 1976. The show sent Billy across the country in a motorhome with his guardian, Mentor, played by Les Tremayne, looking for injustices to resolve.
Welcomed Me Like a King
John Davey, 87, the actor who took over the role of Captain Marvel on the show from Jackson Bostwick, paid tribute via Variety. “Mike was just a loving, sweet guy with a great sense of humor,” Davey said. “From my very first day on ‘Shazam!,’ Mike and Les [Tremayne] welcomed me like a king.”
“He loved acting, loved doing the show and, in recent years, loved appearing at comic cons. He really enjoyed meeting and chatting with the fans. Mike was a wonderful man. I don’t think he ever stopped smiling,” Davey added.
From “Room 222” to “The Brady Bunch”
Gray was born in Chicago on Sept. 2, 1951, and raised in Miami Beach, Fla., and then Hollywood. He studied acting at the Pasadena Playhouse and made his onscreen debut in a 1969 episode of “Room 222,” followed by guest spots on “The Flying Nun,” “Marcus Welby, M.D.” and, later, “Dynasty.”
He played Burt Reynolds’ younger brother in the 1970 ABC telefilm “Run, Simon, Run,” and the same year appeared in the features “Beyond the Valley of the Dolls” and “Myra Breckinridge.” His first series job came in 1972, as a student doctor named Ronnie Collins in the first season of NBC’s “The Little People,” opposite Brian Keith and Shelley Fabares; the show was later renamed “The Brian Keith Show.” In 1973 he turned up on “The Brady Bunch” as Jeff, Marcia’s boyfriend, in an episode built around her shift at the local ice cream shop.
Gray said he had never heard of Captain Marvel when he was called in to read for Billy, and he won the part fast. The producers’ first attempt at the transformation effect used a flash device, by his later recollection; when the smoke cleared, he was singed. That version did not last long.
The Next David Cassidy
Charles Laufer, the Tiger Beat publisher who managed Gray before the series, kept him in front of young audiences. “They wanted me to be the next David Cassidy,” Gray said. His face landed on the covers of Tiger Beat and other teen magazines.
The plan worked so well, Gray said, that while the show was on the air the fan magazine attention made leaving his own house a problem. When “Shazam!” ended, he felt typecast and walked away from acting altogether. In a 2020 interview with Ann Moses, he said he had become “terribly typecast,” which discouraged him from pursuing acting.
From a Flower Shop to Comic Cons
The floral shop he ran had belonged to the parents of his wife, Stacy, and Gray eventually bought it, moving the business from West Hollywood to Beverly Hills, he told Moses in that 2020 interview. The shop closed in the mid-2000s, and the couple went into men’s fashion retail afterward.
The series itself went largely unseen for decades until a DVD release in 2012, which touched off a career resurgence and brought Gray onto the fan convention circuit. At a Comic-Con panel that year, he described the production as exhausting and thrilling at the same time. Part of the draw, he said, was having been in one of the first live-action shows on Saturday morning.
Gray returned to acting in 2016 in the superhero comedy “Surge of Power: Revenge of the Sequel,” playing Will E. Bee, and stayed with the franchise through 2020. He voiced “TV’s Michael Gray,” one of Sterling Archer’s boyhood idols, in four episodes of the FX comedy “Archer” between 2015 and 2019, and he appeared on AMC’s “Comic Book Men.”
He made a brief cameo in 2023 in “Shazam! Fury of the Gods,” sharing a scene with Zachary Levi’s Captain Marvel as a nod to the original series. Asher Angel played Billy Batson in that film.
Gray said in 2012 that people constantly approached him to say the show had carried them through childhood and shaped the adults they became. During production, he said, he had no idea of that reach.
His wife, Stacy Benon Gray, whom he married in 1994, survives him, along with his stepchildren, Ryan Cooper and Laurel Cooper, and his son-in-law, Lee Barker.
