The actor Van Williams, who has died aged 82, achieved brief fame as the masked comic-book hero the Green Hornet in the 1960s US television series of the same name. As Britt Reid, a playboy media mogul who owns a newspaper and TV station, he was seen transforming into his alter ego to tackle criminals with hand-to-hand combat and two deadly weapons, a gas gun and the Hornet’s Sting sonic blaster. He was aided by Bruce Lee (in his first TV role) as Kato, his valet and martial arts expert, and Black Beauty, a customised Chrysler Crown Imperial sedan fitted with infra-green headlights, hood-mounted machine guns, a grille-mounted flame thrower and Stinger missiles stashed in the bumpers.

Unfortunately for Williams, the masked vigilante – created for radio in the 30s by George Trendle and Fran Striker – was unleashed on television viewers in 1966 shortly after the launch of the hugely popular, camped-up Batman TV series, from the same producers. “One of the things I absolutely insisted upon was that I was going to play it straight,” said Williams. “None of this ‘wham, bam, thank you, ma’am’ stuff that was going on with Batman.” But one critic described the star in costume as looking like an “overgrown grasshopper” and the drama was cancelled after just one run of 26 episodes.

Williams was born in Fort Worth, Texas, the son of Priscilla (nee Jarvis) and Bernard Williams, who ran a ranch. After attending Arlington Heights high school and studying animal husbandry and business at Texas Christian university, Williams headed for the South Pacific in 1956 to work as a salvage diver.

The following year, Mike Todd, the theatre and film producer, spotted him and suggested he go into acting. He took vocal and drama lessons, worked on contract to Revue Studios for six months, soon landed bit parts on TV, then signed up for six years to Warner Bros. His big break came in the detective drama Bourbon Street Beat (1959-60) with the role of Kenny Madison, a private eye operating from above a restaurant in the French quarter of New Orleans. He reprised the role in another crime series, Surfside 6 (1960-62), featuring detectives with an office on a Miami houseboat.

Switching to sitcom, Williams played Pat Burns, assistant to the cantankerous billionaire Walter Andrews (played by Walter Brennan) and pilot of his private plane, in The Tycoon (1964-65). He later took the role of Steve Andrews, the father in a family on a journey around Pacific islands, in the children’s adventure series Westwind (1975) and appeared on and off (1976-78) as Captain MacAllister in How the West Was Won.

Williams became a reserve deputy in the Los Angeles county sheriff’s department in 1971, working part time at its Malibu station, where he also captained the mountain rescue team and was a volunteer firefighter. In 1982, he retired from acting to concentrate on running the telecommunications company he had set up in Santa Monica 13 years earlier. He was a partner in a 4,000-acre ranch in Hawaii and he enjoyed hunting geese, duck, elk and other game.

“I didn’t really care that much for the acting business,” Williams said. “I didn’t like the people in it, the way they operated and all the phoniness and back-stabbing. It was not a very pleasant education for a guy from Texas whose handshake was his word. Plus, I’d gone into acting looking at it as a business, not wanting necessarily to be a celebrity.”

Nevertheless, he jumped at the opportunity to take a cameo as the director of The Green Hornet in the film biopic Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story (1993).

Williams is survived by his second wife, Vicki Flaxman, whom he married in 1959, and their children, Nina, Tia and Britt; and by Lisa and Lynne, the twin daughters of his first marriage, to Drucilla Greenhaw, which ended in divorce.

• Van Zandt Jarvis Williams, actor, born 27 February 1934; died 29 November 2016