MARTIN MILNER DIES AT 83

Actor was best known for his starring roles on television’s “Route 66” and “Adam-12.”

Martin Milner, who drove a Corvette across America for four years as the co-star of TV’s “Route 66,” then traded the iconic convertible for a police cruiser as a star of “Adam-12,” died Sunday at his home in Carlsbad, California. He was 83.

The red-haired, freckle-faced Milner had more than a dozen years of work in films and television behind him in 1960 when he began plying the highways and byways of America on “Route 66,” portraying Yale dropout Tod Stiles opposite George Maharis’ streetwise New Yorker Buz Murdock.

The hourlong dramatic series on CBS, in which the two young men became involved in the problems of the people they met as they crisscrossed the country and worked a variety of jobs, was shot on location.

“We didn’t pretend to be on 66 either,” Milner told the Chicago Tribune in 1992. “We always said where we were. If we were in Vermont or in Texas, the audience knew it.”

Maharis was forced to leave the show after a bout with hepatitis and was replaced in 1963 by Glenn Corbett, who played returning Vietnam veteran Linc Case. The show ended in 1964.

Milner returned to series television in 1968 as Officer Pete Malloy in “Adam-12.” Produced by Jack Webb of “Dragnet” fame, the half-hour NBC police drama co-starred Kent McCord as Officer Jim Reed.

The series, which focused on the daily routine of two uniformed LAPD officers assigned to patrolcar duty, ran until 1975.

“People said, ‘It looks like you guys like each other,’” McCord said Monday. “And we did. We never had to pretend.”

Although fans continued to recognize Milner all his life, he downplayed his TV-star status.

“I was never a celebrity,” he told People magazine in 1995, “just a working actor.”