John Hart is best remembered for playing the Lone Ranger on television for one season, and he also starred as the frontiersman, Hawkeye, in the Canadian series, Hawkeye and the Last of the Mohicans (April 1957 - December 1957), based on the novels by James Fenimore Cooper.
Hart was born near Pasedena, CA, on December 13, 1917; his mother was a well-known drama critic, and John decided in high school that he wanted to be an actor. As a teenager, he worked as a cowboy for a couple summers, and he liked to surf long before the sport became popular. Before he got drafted into the Army (he was drafted before Pearl Harbor), he had small roles in a several films.
He continued to work as an actor after he got out of the Army, playing the title character in the 1947 serial, Jack Armstrong, The All-American Boy, and appearing in dozens of movies and TV shows, including three very small roles on I Love Lucy. His part in the script from his first Lucy episode ("Lucy Changes Her Mind") reads simply, "From behind the curtains leading to the back steps the most handsome hunk of man anyone ever saw for $15.56."
Although John said that he like acting—the action, the activity of it—the pay was not his favorite. Money was eventually what caused him to give up his career, although he was never that popular in the first place. Awkward onscreen, he was always either overacting or underacting. When he did land a part like on The Lone Ranger, viewers struggled to accept his performance.
Hawkeye was a better, a much more comfortable, role for him, but the show lasted only thirty-nine episodes. While filming in Canada, Hart met his wife, actress Beryl Braithwaite. She was twenty and he was nearing forty, and they knew each other no more than ten days before they were married, but their marriage lasted over fifty years.
"Tired of the feast or famine life of an actor," John writes in the preface of his cookbook, Cowboys in the Kitchen, "I got involved in production, writing, directing, camera, editing, and sound mixing." He also had his own company that made small films for schools, travel agencies, etc. He would make a couple appearances as the Lone Ranger in the 80s, including on The Greatest American Hero and on Happy Days, which was his last onscreen role.
After years of retirement, John Hart passed away at the age of ninety-one on September 20, 2009, leaving behind his wife and their daughter.
Sources:
Hart, John—Cowboys in the Kitchen
Van Hise, James—Who Was That Masked Man? The Story of the Lone Ranger