Eric Dane

Eric Dane was hired for one episode of Grey's Anatomy and stayed for six seasons. He was 33 when he turned up as the plastic surgeon Mark Sloan, and the part made him famous enough that thirteen years later Sam Levinson could cast him against type as Cal Jacobs, the father with the double life in Euphoria. He died on 19 February 2026, aged 53, ten months after telling the world he had ALS.

Born Eric William Melvin in San Francisco on 9 November 1972, he was raised in his mother's Jewish faith, bar mitzvah included. His father died of a gunshot wound when he was seven. At school he played water polo and found acting almost by accident, in a student production of Arthur Miller's 'All My Sons', and he moved to Los Angeles in 1993.

Years of one-episode parts followed: Saved by the Bell, The Wonder Years, Roseanne, Married... With Children. His first steady job was the ABC hospital drama 'Gideon's Crossing' in 2000, twenty one episodes as Dr Wyatt Cooper, and after that came two seasons as Jason Dean in Charmed and a Charles "Tex" Watson in the Manson family television film 'Helter Skelter' (2004).

Seattle Grace and a nickname he never lost

Mark Sloan was written for episode 18 of the second season and nothing more. The audience response was strong enough to make him a regular in the third, and his first appearance that year, walking out of a bathroom in nothing but a towel with the steam behind him, is a scene Shonda Rhimes has named as one of her favourite moments in the whole series. The nickname came straight out of it: McSteamy, built to rhyme with the McDreamy of Patrick Dempsey.

Sloan lasted 135 episodes. There was a messy triangle with Dempsey and Kate Walsh, a daughter with the Callie Torres of Sara Ramírez, two episodes of the spin-off Private Practice, and above all the relationship with Chyler Leigh's Lexie Grey that viewers still argue about. The character died at the start of season nine, of injuries from the plane crash that closed season eight.

Dane's own account of that exit is worth hearing. On Dax Shepard's podcast in June 2024 he said, "I think I was let go." He had been in treatment in 2011 for a painkiller addiction, he was becoming expensive for the network, and as he put it, "I wasn't the same guy they had hired." He also said Rhimes protected the cast fiercely, in public and in private. Of his eight years on the show he reckoned he had been "messed up longer than I was sober".

He went back once. On 1 April 2021, in the episode 'Breathe', Sloan and Lexie turned up on the beach Meredith was dreaming while she lay in a coma. Nine years after killing the character off, the series found a way to use him without bringing him back.

Captain Chandler and Cal Jacobs

From 2014 to 2018 he led The Last Ship as Commander Tom Chandler, captain of an American destroyer in a world flattened by a pandemic. It ran five seasons and 56 episodes on TNT, loosely adapted from William Brinkley's 1988 novel, with Michael Bay among the executive producers and Dane himself credited as a producer. Filming stopped for several weeks in spring 2017 while he was dealing with depression, which he later talked about openly.

Cal Jacobs, from 2019 on, was the opposite of a heartthrob: a closeted, violent, self-loathing father whose collapse runs under the whole of Euphoria, and the hardest scenes in the show are usually his. The father and son double act with Jacob Elordi gave him a second audience a generation younger than the first. In 2025 he was still working steadily: the European drama 'Kabul', thirteen episodes of the Prime Video thriller 'Countdown' opposite Jensen Ackles, and the film 'Borderline' with Samara Weaving.

The film roles

In the cinema he was the useful kind of actor rather than the showy kind. He played Multiple Man in X-Men: The Last Stand, led Open Water 2: Adrift as one of the friends who jump off a yacht and realise nobody lowered the ladder, appeared in the science fiction television film Painkiller Jane, and was Owen Wilson's smoother colleague on the newspaper in Marley & Me.

Two came out in 2010. In Valentine's Day he was a closeted American football star, which put him back alongside Dempsey in Garry Marshall's enormous cast, and in Burlesque he was the property developer courting the Ali of Christina Aguilera and trying to buy the club out from under Cher. Earlier he had appeared in 'Serving in Silence' (1995) with Glenn Close and in 'Wedding Wars' (2006) as the brother of a gay character played by John Stamos.

His last two cinema roles were James McGrath in Bad Boys: Ride or Die, a former Army Ranger turned villain, opposite Will Smith and Martin Lawrence, and the antiquities thief Dillon MacIntosh in Americana, Tony Tost's first feature with Sydney Sweeney and Halsey, which sat on a shelf for two years after its festival premiere before Lionsgate released it in 2025.

ALS and the last year

The first symptom was an unexplained weakness in one hand, early in 2024. The announcement came in a statement to People on 10 April 2025, and in June he sat down with Diane Sawyer on 'Good Morning America' with his right arm no longer working. "I don't think this is the end of my story. I don't feel like this is the end of me," he said there. Asked by the Washington Post why he had gone public, he said that "it was getting increasingly difficult to hide what was going on".

Then he campaigned. He was due to present at the Emmys in September 2025 with his old Grey's Anatomy colleague Jesse Williams to mark the show's twentieth anniversary, fell hard in his kitchen and spent the ceremony having his head stitched. Two days later he was in Washington.

Two trips to Capitol Hill followed, alongside the campaign group I AM ALS, pushing for the reauthorisation of the ACT for ALS law. He told members of both parties he would "fight to the last breath on this one".

On 24 November 2025 he guest starred in Brilliant Minds as a firefighter with ALS who hides the diagnosis from his family. The episode existed because he asked for it: he approached the writers, who consulted two neurologists before putting it together, and a card pointing viewers to an ALS charity ran after the credits at his request.

That same year he shot the whole of the third and final season of Euphoria, from February to November. It went out from 12 April to 31 May 2026, on Sky Atlantic and Now in Britain, and Levinson dedicated it to him, to Angus Cloud and to the producer Kevin Turen.

Dane died on a Thursday afternoon in Los Angeles, of respiratory failure according to the death certificate obtained by People. His family said he spent his last days with close friends, his wife and his two daughters, Billie and Georgia, "who were the centre of his world". His marriage to the actress Rebecca Gayheart dated from 2004; they separated in 2018, and she withdrew the divorce petition in March 2025, a month before he made the diagnosis public.

Grey's Anatomy said goodbye on 26 February with a montage at the end of episode 11 of season 22, set to 'Chasing Cars' and closing on a dedication in black and white.

Netflix then released the interview he had recorded the previous November on the condition that it stay unseen until after he died. In it he talks about his father, about how lonely and frightened the man must have been that day, and about his grandmother's belief that the gunshot was an accident, which he did not share. He ends by speaking to his daughters: "Live now. Right now. The past holds regret and the future is unknown." His memoir, 'My Book of Days', came out on 3 November 2026.

The earliest credit MovieNCo has for Eric Dane is Charmed (2003); in all, 7 films and 4 TV shows over 23 years. Their title most voted by MovieNCo readers is Euphoria (2019), with 805 votes. Their busiest decade is the 2000s, with 6 titles.