It’s really spooky about how the rule of three — celebrities always seeming to leave the earth in trios within the same two- or three-day period — keeps happening. I was on the verge of saying it hadn’t occured last weekend with the deaths of Darren McGavin and Don Knotts, but now comes the news of Dennis Weaver‘s passing in Connecticut last Friday. The three actors were all in their early ’80s and had their greatest triumphs on television in the ’50-s, ’60s and ’70s. Weaver called his Sam McCloud character, based on an Arizona lawman played by Clint Eastwood in Don Siegel‘s Coogan’s Bluff, and whom he played in his own soft-pedalled way on McCloud series from ’70 to ’77, “the most satisfying role of my career.” If you ask me Weaver’s finest hour, hands down, was his performance as the terrorized motorist in Steven Spielberg’s Duel (’71).