Crowds could vary dramatically. Some nights brought around 400 people, while others attracted only a few dozen.
But Gortner later said many audiences ultimately wanted the same kind of message.
“About eternal damnation, to be threatened with Hell, to be driven into repenting.”
According to Gortner, the emotional intensity of the services was often designed to bring people to a state where they would donate as much money as possible.
He later estimated that his family had accumulated around $3 million by the time he was 16.
Then everything changed.
Shortly after his 16th birthday, Gortner said his father disappeared with the money.
As he became older, Gortner grew increasingly uncomfortable with the religious world in which he had been raised.
Eventually, he decided to leave preaching behind and pursue entertainment.
That decision would lead to the project that permanently changed his public image.
In 1971, Gortner agreed to allow filmmakers Howard Smith and Sarah Kernochan to follow him during what would become his final revival tour.
The cameras captured both his public sermons and his candid explanations of the techniques he said evangelists used to manipulate crowds and encourage donations.
The resulting documentary, *Marjoe*, was released in 1972.
The film attracted enormous attention, screened at the Cannes Film Festival, and went on to win the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.
Gortner had taken the complicated and painful circumstances of his childhood and turned them into a story seen around the world.
But his career was far from finished.
After the documentary’s success, Gortner recorded an album titled *Bad, but Not Evil* and signed an acting deal with Universal Pictures.
One of his first major acting roles came in the 1973 television movie *The Marcus-Nelson Murders*, which later served as the pilot for the hit series *Kojak*.
Acting, in many ways, came naturally to him.
“All of my life I thought of being an actor. My training for it was the best I could have had,” he told the Oakland Tribune in 1974.
He appeared in the 1974 disaster film *Earthquake* and later starred alongside Candy Clark in *When You Comin’ Back, Red Ryder?*
His other film credits included *Bobbie Jo and the Outlaw*, *The Food of the Gods*, *Viva Knievel!* and the cult science-fiction movie *Starcrash*.
Television audiences also saw him in shows such as *The A-Team*, *Fantasy Island*, *Airwolf*, *Police Story*, and *Falcon Crest*, where he portrayed corrupt psychic Vince Karlotti.
Later in life, Gortner became involved in producing celebrity sporting events and *Circus of the Stars* specials.
Those projects also became a way for him to raise money for charitable causes.
Actor Ian Ziering paid tribute to Gortner by remembering not only his unusual career, but also his generosity.
“Marjoe Gortner was a force of nature. He became an evangelist in his teens, an actor in his young adulthood. His life story won an Oscar.”
Ziering also recalled Gortner’s work organizing celebrity sports events around the world to benefit charities.
“This man raised millions and millions of dollars for different charities while providing some of the most incredible celebrity experiences of my lifetime. I will never forget this man, and I will always be appreciative of not just what he did for me, but what he did for everyone who knew him.”
Gortner’s personal life included several marriages before he married Susan Magestro in Santa Fe in 2019.
Yet perhaps the most remarkable part of his story remained the dramatic distance between where his life began and where it eventually took him.
He had been placed on a stage as a very young child and trained to deliver sermons before he could fully understand what was happening around him.
Years later, he publicly revealed the world behind those performances.
Then he walked away from preaching, helped create an Oscar-winning documentary about his own experiences, and built an entirely different career in Hollywood.
Few people live even one life as unusual as his.
Marjoe Gortner seemed to live several.
Child preacher.
Documentary subject.
Hollywood actor.
Musician.
Producer.
Philanthropist.
His path was complicated, controversial, and unlike almost anyone else’s.
And after more than eight decades filled with reinvention, public success, and an extraordinary personal story, Marjoe Gortner’s remarkable journey has come to an end at 82.