American musician, songwriter, actor, producer, novelist, businessman, and philanthropist, best known as a member of the pop rock band the Monkees and co-star of the TV series The Monkees (1966-1968). The group was manufactured in 1965 by TV producers Bert Schneider and Bob Rafelson, who put the four young men together for a weekly series, patterned on the irreverent humour and style of The Beatles. They had a few hit singles such as “Last Train to Clarksville,” and “I’m a Believer.” Later, Nesmith formed his own group, (Mike Nesmith and) the First National Band, which had one hit song, “Joann” in 1970.
His mother Bette Nesmith Graham, a businesswoman and the inventor of Liquid Paper, died on 12 May 1980, aged 56, in Richardson, Texas. As her only son, Michael Nesmith inherited half of his mother’s estate of over $50 million.
In the 1980s, Nesmith began to get involved with film production. He was an executive producer of the cult film Repo Man (1984). In 1981, Nesmith won the first Grammy Award given for Video of the Year for his hour-long television show, Elephant Parts. He published a first novel in 1999, “The Long Sandy Hair of Neftoon Zamora.”
On 1 February 1999, a federal jury in Los Angeles found the PBS guilty of fraud in a deal it had made with Nesmith and ordered the network to pay him $46 million. In 1990, his company, Pacific Arts, established a home video library but when his company ran into financial trouble, PBS acquired the rights to his programs surreptitiously.
He married Phyllis Ann Barbour in 1963, and they had three children before divorcing in 1972. Nesmith also had a son, Jason, born in August 1968 to Nurit Wilde, whom he met while working on The Monkees.
In 1976, he married Kathryn Bild. In 1988, following the ending of this second marriage, he met Victoria Kennedy and they were married in April 2000. They separated in 2011 and Kennedy filed for divorce.
Nesmith was forced to cancel the last four dates of his 2018 tour with Micky Dolenz due to a “minor health scare”. In an interview with Rolling Stone published on 26 July that year, Nesmith said he had undergone quadruple bypass heart surgery, and had been hospitalized for over a month. Nesmith died from heart failure at his home in Carmel Valley, California, on 10 December 2021 at the age of 78.
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