(January 23, 1943 – December 16, 2025)
Gilbert Cyril Gerard was an American actor, whose roles include that of Captain William "Buck" Rogers in the 1979–1981 television series Buck Rogers in the 25th Century.
Gerard was born on January 23, 1943, in Little Rock, Arkansas, as the youngest of three sons to a college instructor mother and a salesman father. In 1960, he attended a Maryknoll seminary in Glen Ellyn, Illinois, and played the title role in an all-male production of The Music Man. He graduated from Little Rock Catholic High School for Boys, and later attended the University of Central Arkansas but dropped out before graduation.
Gerard landed his best-known role, as Captain William "Buck" Rogers in the TV series Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, which ran from 1979 to 1981, with the feature-length pilot episode being released theatrically some months prior to the first broadcast of the series. After this, he was featured in a number of other TV shows and movies, including starring roles in the 1982 TV movie Hear No Evil as Dragon, the short-lived series Sidekicks (1986), and E.A.R.T.H. Force (1990).
In 1992, Gerard hosted the reality TV series Code 3, which followed firefighters from different areas of the U,S, as they responded to emergency calls. The show ran on the Fox TV Network until the following year. For the remainder of the 1990s, Gerard made guest appearances on various TV shows, including Fish Police, Brotherly Love, The Big Easy, Days of Our Lives, and Pacific Blue.
In January 2007, Gerard was the subject of the one-hour documentary Action Hero Makeover, which was written, produced, and directed by his then-longtime companion, Adrienne Crow for the Discovery Health Channel. The film documented his year-long progress after undergoing life-saving mini-gastric bypass surgery in October 2005. According to the program, he had been struggling with his weight for 40 years, losing weight only to gain it back. By the time of the program's production, his weight had risen to over 350 pounds (159 kg), and he had many life-threatening health issues including a severe problem with type 2 diabetes. Within five days of the surgery he had lost 20 lb (9 kg), within three months he had lost 80 lb (36 kg), and within ten months he lost a total of 145 lb (66 kg).
Gerard and his Buck Rogers co-star Erin Gray reunited in 2007 for the TV film Nuclear Hurricane, and also returned to the Buck Rogers universe by playing the characters' parents in the pilot episode of James Cawley's Buck Rogers Begins Internet video series in 2009.
