Ronnie Schell, the comedian and character actor who spent 92 episodes as the wisecracking Pvt. Duke Slater on the 1960s CBS military sitcom Gomer Pyle: U.S.M.C., died Friday at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles. He was 94. His publicist confirmed he had been hospitalized following a recent fall and died of natural causes. He is survived by his wife Janet, sons Gregory and Christian, and granddaughter Chiara. His death closes the last chapter of the show’s principal cast.
Born Ronald Ralph Schell on December 23, 1931, in Richmond, California, he launched his career on a dare — auditioning at San Francisco’s famed Purple Onion nightclub while still a senior at San Francisco State University. Signed for a five-month stint, he parlayed that into years of stand-up work across the Bay Area’s North Beach clubs before touring nationally and performing in Las Vegas, where he continued appearing occasionally until the end of his life. He billed himself, with characteristic self-deprecation, as “America’s Slowest Rising Young Comedian” — a joke that became a kind of badge.
The break that made him a household face came through his manager, Dick Link, who also represented Jim Nabors and Andy Griffith. When a spinoff of The Andy Griffith Show went into production in 1964, Link got Schell the call. “I was working in Fresno at a place called The Hacienda,” Schell recalled, “and Dick Link called me and said, ‘Listen, we’re doing a spinoff.'” As Duke Slater — the street-smart city boy to Nabors’ guileless Gomer — Schell appeared in three of the show’s five seasons, was briefly written out to star alongside Goldie Hawn in the one-season CBS comedy Good Morning, World, then returned for the final run, with Duke promoted to corporal.
His television footprint extended well beyond Mayberry. He made appearances on The Andy Griffith Show, The Patty Duke Show, That Girl, The Dukes of Hazzard, and Saved by the Bell, accumulating more than 140 screen credits over six decades. Voice work added another dimension to that career — he provided the voice of the animated Peter Puck for NBC’s NHL broadcasts in the 1970s and lent his voice to The Smurfs, DuckTales, and Scooby-Doo, among others. His final screen credits came in 2020 and 2022.
