time to be without financial security. "The show allowed Roberts to both use his dramatic range and address issues," wrote The Independent.Of the period between series, Roberts said he enjoyed moving around and playing different characters. During that time, he also toured university campuses conducting seminars on play production, acting, and poetry. In 1980, Roberts reunited with his former Bonanza co-star Lorne Greene, for two episodes of Vega$. In 1988, Roberts co-starred with Milla Jovovich in the TV movie The Night Train to Kathmandu.He guest-starred as Hezekiah Horn in the powerful Young Riders episode, "Requiem for a Hero", for which he won a Western Heritage Award in 1991. In interviews, Roberts had described television as a "director's and film cutter's medium," but he himself was described as a "born television actor........low key." In the 1980s and 1990s, playing off his Trapper John M.D. persona, Roberts acted as TV spokesman for Ecotrin, a brand of analgesic tablets. His roles since included Donor (1990) with Melissa Gilbert and Checkered Flag (1990). He appeared as captain of the CBS teams for Battle of the Network Stars 11 and 12. He narrated documentaries, including the National Geographic episode, "Alaska, The Great Land" in 1965, "In the Realm of the Alligator" in 1986, the TV special Code One about the work of paramedics in 1989, and "The Mountain Men" episode of the History Channel, 1999. From 1991 to 1993, in his last venture into series television, Roberts lent his distinctive voice to host and narrate the TV anthology series, FBI: The Untold Stories. He made his last TV appearance in 1997 on an episode of Diagnosis: Murder, updating a Mannix character he had portrayed decades before. In his later life, and after the death of all of his former Bonanza co-stars, Roberts "jokingly referred to himself as, 'Pernell, the last one, Roberts.'" He read Bonanza Gold Magazine, which was like looking at an old family album, he said, and watched reruns of Bonanza when he wanted to see old friends. Personal life and death Roberts married four times, first in 1951 to Vera Mowry — a professor of theatre history at Washington State University and subsequently Hunter College, as well as professor emerita of the PhD program in theatre at City University of New York — with whom he had his only child (Jonathan Christopher "Chris" Roberts). Roberts and his first wife later divorced. Chris