Marc Gilpin, the child actor who played a son of Roy Scheider’s Police Chief Martin Brody in 1978’s Jaws 2, died Saturday in Dallas of the aggressive brain cancer glioblastoma. He was 56.
His death was announced by his sister, the Frasier actor Peri Gilpin.
Marc Gilpin, born in Austin, Texas, had already appeared in commercials, the Saturday morning NBC series Thunder (1977) and, in 1978, the film Where’s Willy? when, at 11, he was cast in director Jeannot Szwarc’s sequel to Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster Jaws. While Roy Scheider and Lorraine Gary reprised their roles as Brody and wife Ellen, the young actors playing the characters’ two sons in the original film, Chris Rebello and Jay Mello, had outgrown the roles and were replaced by Mark Gruner (as elder son Mike) and Gilpin (as Sean).
Gruner and Gilpin were at the center of one of Jaws 2‘s most memorable sequences, in which the Brody boys, disobeying their parents’ orders, join friends in a sailing excursion, an outing that ends with a terrifying shark attack (the Brody boys were traumatized but otherwise unharmed).
Marc Gilpin subsequently guest starred throughout the 1970s and ’80s in such series as CHiPs, Fantasy Island, CBS Afternoon Playhouse, Silver Spoons and China Beach, the TV movie Surviving (co-starring Ellen Burstyn, Molly Ringwald and River Phoenix) as well as in feature films The Legend of the Lone Ranger, License to Kill and She’s Out of Control. But by the 1990s he had largely retired from show business to work as a software engineer.
Last year, Gilpin was diagnosed with glioblastoma. According to a GoFundMe account, after some initial improvement in his condition, new cancer growth was detected several months ago.
Marc Gilpin is survived by wife Kaki, sons Spencer and Presley, and sister Peri. He was predeceased by sisters April and Patti.