Veteran television character actor Kevin Hagen, who left behind a string of Western bad guy roles to become the kindly Dr. Hiram Baker in “Little House on the Prairie,” died Saturday at his home in Grants Pass, Ore. He was 77.

Born in Chicago, the son of professional ballroom dancers, Hagen did not start acting until he was 27, by which time he had worked for the U.S. State Department in Germany, earned a degree in international relations, and served in the Navy after World War II.

Hagen got his big break a year later when a Hollywood agent saw him as the domineering patriarch Ephraim Cabot in Eugene O’Neill’s “Desire Under the Elms,” and got him a part in the television series “Dragnet.”

He credited his role as a Confederate deserter who murders the son of a Virginia farmer played by James Stewart in the 1965 film “Shenandoah” with starting him on a long trail of TV Western heavies.

Hagen had guest-starring roles on “Gunsmoke,” “Rawhide,” and “Cheyenne,” and won his first regular role in the 1958 series, “Yancy Derringer,” in which he played a city administrator of post-Civil War New Orleans.

He was best known for his portrayal of Doc Baker in “Little House on the Prairie,” which ran from 1974 to 1983.

“The joke when Michael Landon asked him if he could drive a buggy when they were putting “Little House” together was, Kevin said, ‘Yeah, as long as there isn’t a horse attached,”‘ his wife recalled.