Eric Dane, the hunky actor who found fame and the nickname “McSteamy” for his eight-year run as the plastic surgeon Mark Sloan on the ABC drama Grey’s Anatomy, has lost his battle with ALS. He was 53.
Dane died Thursday afternoon, his reps announced in a statement. He revealed in April that he had been diagnosed with the rare degenerative disease, having first experienced symptoms a year and a half earlier.
“He spent his final days surrounded by dear friends, his devoted wife [actress Rebecca Gayheart] and his two beautiful daughters, Billie and Georgia, who were the center of his world,” reads the statement.
“Throughout his journey with ALS, Eric became a passionate advocate for awareness and research, determined to make a difference for others facing the same fight. He will be deeply missed, and lovingly remembered always. Eric adored his fans and is forever grateful for the outpouring of love and support he’s received. The family has asked for privacy as they navigate this impossible time.”
The San Francisco native also starred for five seasons (2014-18) as the captain of a U.S. Navy destroyer searching for the cure to a global pandemic on the TNT post-apocalyptic drama The Last Ship. And on HBO’s Euphoria, he had a secret sex life as the father of Jacob Elordi’s Nate Jacobs during that show’s first two seasons (2019-22).
On the big screen, Dane portrayed Jamie Madrox/Multiple Man, who can create many copies of himself, in Brett Ratner’s X-Men: The Last Stand (2006), and he was a newspaper reporter alongside Owen Wilson and Jennifer Aniston in David Frankel’s Marley & Me (2008).
The charismatic, blue-eyed Dane had already made an impression as a recurring character on The WB’s Charmed when he first appeared midway through the second season of the Shonda Rhimes-created Grey’s Anatomy. The childhood best friend of Seattle Grace Hospital neurosurgeon Derek Shepherd (Patrick Dempsey), Mark had once had an affair with Derek’s wife, Addison (Kate Walsh).
On the second episode of season three, which premiered Sept. 28, 2006, an uncredited Dane is seen emerging from a hotel bathroom in a towel around his waist as Derek and Addison talk about their troubled marriage.
“In the moment, it was just another scene to me,” he told Diane Sawyer in an interview about his ALS diagnosis for Good Morning America. “I just remember walking out of a bathroom with a very nice [effects] gentleman blowing smoke [to create steam] toward me.”
Signed originally for just one episode, Dane became a regular after that scene and appeared in another 134 installments through May 2012, when Mark and soulmate Lexie (Chyler Leigh) are fatally injured in a plane crash during the eighth-season finale (Mark dies at the start of season nine).
While working on the show, Dane checked himself into rehab for an addiction to painkillers, he noted on a 2024 episode of Dax Shepard’s Armchair Expert podcast. He added that he left the series because of budgetary reasons.
“I wasn’t the same guy they had hired. So I had understood when I was let go,” he said. “And Shonda was really great. She protected us fiercely. She protected us publicly. She protected us privately. … But I was probably fired. It wasn’t ceremoniously like, ‘You’re fired,’ it was just like, ‘You’re not coming back.’
“If you take the whole eight years on Grey’s Anatomy, I was fucked up longer than I was sober. And that’s when things started going sideways for me. It was overwhelming, and I think I just wanted to pretend that it wasn’t and that I was comfortable with it. Act like you’ve been there, but you haven’t been there.”
Dane did return for one final Grey’s Anatomy episode in 2021 during season 17 when he visits Meredith (Ellen Pompeo) on an imaginary beach while she is in a COVID-induced coma.
Eric William Melvin was born in San Francisco on Nov. 9, 1972. When he was 7, his father, William, an architect and interior designer, died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. “My grandmother thinks it was an accident,” he said in a 2014 interview. “Everybody’s got a different opinion on it.” His mother, Leah, would raise him and his younger brother, Sean.
At San Mateo High School, he was a member on the water polo team, “got roped” into portraying Joe Keller in Arthur Miller’s All My Sons and fell hard for acting. A month before graduation, he quit school and moved to Los Angeles to take acting classes.
He made his onscreen debut on a 1991 episode of Saved by the Bell, then showed up on The Wonder Years, Married … With Children, Silk Stalkings and Roseanne before landing his first TV doctor gig on the 2000-01 ABC drama Gideon’s Crossing, starring Andre Braugher.
(Around this time, he started dating actress Lara Flynn Boyle while she also was involved with Jack Nicholson.)
Dane joined Charmed in 2003 to portray Jason Dean, Phoebe’s (Alyssa Milano) boss at The Bay Mirror newspaper and later her boyfriend, for nine episodes during the series’ fifth and six seasons.
In 2004, he played Charles “Tex” Watson, one of the Manson family, in the CBS telefilm Helter Skelter, starring Jeremy Davies, before he came out of that shower on Grey’s Anatomy.
“The towel scene has definitely done something for me,” Dane said in 2007. “I guess nobody has to guess what is under my T-shirt anymore.”
As he started out at Seattle Grace, Mark was a real scoundrel, called “McSteamy” by the female interns at the hospital (many of whom he had slept with). And in promotional materials for the series, he was described as “the kind of guy who women hate falling for but just can’t resist. Oh, and he can even suture his own cut face.”
In 2010, Dane and Dempsey appeared in Garry Marshall’s Valentine’s Day, and he played a wealthy clubgoer in Burlesque (2010), starring Cher and Christina Aguilera.
While on The Last Ship, on which he also served as a producer, the series went on hiatus in April 2017 while he dealt with depression.
More recently, Dane remained in demand with roles in the films Redeeming Love (2022), Bad Boys: Ride or Die (2024), One Fast Move (2024) and Borderline (2025) and with a stint as an FBI agent on the 2025 Prime Video series Countdown.
And in October, he played a firefighter with ALS on NBC’s Brilliant Minds in his final role.
He said he proposed to Gayheart over dinner in October 2004, and they flew to Las Vegas that night and got married. She filed for divorce in 2018 but in March withdrew those documents, E! News reported; he told Sawyer that she was his “biggest champion, my most stalwart supporter.”
Talking about his ALS struggle with Sawyer, he said, “I’m angry because my father was taken from me when I was young, and now there’s a very good chance I’m going to be taken from my girls when they’re very young. At the end of the day, I all I want to do is spend time with my family and work a little bit if I can.”
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