The “Baywatch” actor, a real lifeguard, was 67 years old

Michael “Newmie” Newman, the real lifeguard who appeared for 10 seasons Baywatch one of the action show's most famous characters, has died after his long battle with Parkinson's disease. He was 67 years old.

Newman died Sunday at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center Matthew Felker, the writer, director and producer behind Hulu's new docuseries After Baywatch: Time in the Sunsaid The Hollywood journalist. He was diagnosed in 2006.

“This terminal illness has given me a lot of time to think, which I may not have wanted, but it has brought me wisdom,” Newman said People revised two months ago.

A one-time Iron Man competitor and firefighter who stood 6-foot-5 and weighed 250 pounds in his prime, Newman was the only Baywatch cast member who actually worked as a Los Angeles County lifeguard, having started as a junior lifeguard in the shadow of the Santa Monica Pier when he was 10 years old.

Like Newmie, he appeared in 109 episodes from 1989 to 2000 during the show's first 10 seasons — the first on NBC, the next nine in syndication — and only David Hasselhoff and Jeremy Jackson did more. Baywatch it would become a global phenomenon, broadcast in more than 140 countries around the world.

He then returned to being a full-time firefighter for Los Angeles County.

Newman was born in San Francisco on April 26, 1957 and raised in Brentwood, Los Angeles. His parents were British; his father, also Michael, was a member of the British national water polo team and his mother, Joan, was a swimming teacher.

He graduated from Palisades Charter High School, competed on the swim teams at Santa Monica City College and UC Santa Barbara and worked as a lifeguard for more than two decades prior. Baywatch he motioned. (His brother Mark was also a Los Angeles County lifeguard.)

“Because I had the right look, fellow guard Greg Bonnan [co-creator of Baywatch] he asked me to be on a teaser tape to sell the concept,” Newman recalled in the 2007 book Hometown Santa Monica. “He couldn't pay me, but he promised that if he went, there would be a job for me. It was a day in the life of a lifeguard: saving the kids, breaking up the fight, meeting the girl, riding off into the sunset – you know, just like in real life.

Newman was in the 1989 pilot Baywatch: Panic at the Malibu Pier and in the first episode of Baywatch and usually appeared uncredited in other early episodes. As he went along, he did water stunts that no one else could perform and offered advice to the writers on rescue scenes; all of this eventually got him some dialogue.

“I was too useful for them to get rid of me,” he said People in another interview. “I basically started out as a stuntman, and after seven years of being in the headlines, I was finally anointed and allowed to be in the front row of the show.”

He and Hasselhoff left the series after the Hawaii-set tenth season; the show only lasted one more season.

Newman also appeared in three episodes of the syndicated spin-off Baywatch Nights in 1996 and in the 1998 direct-to-video film Baywatch: White Thunder in Glacier Bay.

In addition to his brother, survivors include his wife of 37 years, Sarah; their son, Chris (another Los Angeles lifeguard), and daughter, Emily; their granddaughter, Charlie; and a sister.

Newman, who attempted to fend off Parkinson's through a rigorous exercise routine, was diagnosed when he was 50, and “all those things you thought you were going to do with your kids and grandkids, the pictures we were going to take, all the projects I I was… stopped,” he said People.

Chris Gardner contributed to this report.

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