Actor Ed Nelson Memorial Video

Edwin Stafford "Ed" Nelson (December 21, 1928 – August 9, 2014) was an American actor best known for his role as Dr. Michael Rossi in the ABC television series Peyton Place. He was a native of New Orleans, Louisiana.

While living in Los Angeles, Nelson was an active member of the Screen Actors Guild and was elected to the union board for many years. Nelson was a long-standing member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and maintained a long tradition of participation in voting for the Academy Awards. He also served as the mayor of San Dimas, California for many years.

Nelson also spent a couple of years playing U.S. President Harry S. Truman onstage, having replaced James Whitmore for the National Tour of "Give 'Em Hell, Harry."

In 1999, Nelson returned to Tulane University to finish credits toward his undergraduate degree, which he completed the following year at the age of seventy-one. He and his wife, Patsy, enjoyed semi-retirement visiting his six children and fourteen grandchildren.

Nelson appeared in episodes of many television programs, more than fifty motion pictures, and hundreds of stage productions. Until 2005, he had been teaching acting and screenwriting in New Orleans at two local universities there. Hurricane Katrina prompted him to move his family far to the north to Sterlington, north of Monroe, in Ouachita Parish, in northeastern Louisiana. At the time of his death, however, he had relocated to Greensboro, North Carolina, where he had been in hospice care and died at the age of eighty-five.