Marjoe Gortner, America’s youngest ordained minister, dies at 82

By Leonardo Blair, Senior Reporter Tuesday, October 06, 2026

Actor Hugh Marjoe Ross Gortner, better known as Marjoe Gortner who became America’s youngest ordained minister and whose life inspired the Oscar-winning 1972 documentary “Marjoe,” has died. He was 82.

Sarah Kernochan, co-producer of “Marjoe,” announced Gortner’s death in a Facebook post Saturday.

“Marjoe Gortner died yesterday,” Kernochan wrote in the brief announcement.

Gortner’s fifth wife, Susan Magestro, said in a statement to Variety on Sunday that he died of congestive heart failure in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

“Marjoe lived an extraordinary life, shaped by his imagination and rare gift for bringing people together,” Magestro said.

Gortner was born Hugh Marjoe Ross Gortner on Jan. 14, 1944, in Long Beach, California. The name Marjoe is a blend of the biblical Mary and Joseph.

His Evangelical parents introduced him to the world as a gifted child preacher. They had him ordained at age 4 and, in 1949, had him perform a marriage ceremony for a Paramount newsreel, according to Kernochan in a 2006 article for The American Prospect.

Gortner, who lost his faith at 16 after his father ran off with about $3 million, returned to preaching as an adult solely for the money — and brought cameras along.

“Marjoe,” which captured Gortner counting money and sharing tricks of the trade, exposed the independent Pentecostal revival circuit as a highly lucrative, manipulative business.

“I can’t really think of a time that I ever believed in God or in you know, ever thought that was a miracle of God that I preached,” Gortner, who said he started preaching at 3.5 years old, recalled in the documentary.

“I don’t think even with all the people gathering around me, you know, thousands of people saying this has to be a miracle, surely God has called you and all that. […] I just knew that I could do it well and my parents had trained me,” he said.

Gortner’s parents taught him lengthy sermons and how to perform them. Ripley’s Believe It or Not dubbed him the “World’s Youngest Minister.”

“Marjoe and his parents toured the country for eight more years, raking in offerings from eager crowds, some $3 million by his own reckoning. Receiving his sermons from heaven, delivering souls, healing the sick, he seemed like God’s little angel, or — as his father put it ingenuously — ‘a preaching machine,’” Kernochan wrote.

“After a time, the act broke down. Marjoe’s father absconded with the money, the prepubescent boy was too old to be a novelty anymore, and his rage surfaced. He left his mother and lived off the kindness of nonreligious strangers in California for the duration of his adolescence,” she wrote. “Then he found himself drawn back to the flame — the spotlight, the adulation, and of course the cash — of the evangelical circuit. His audiences never knew that his belief in God was nil, and the host preachers had no idea that he had, in his other life, joined with legions of hippies.”

According to Kernochan, Gortner used “Marjoe” to fuel his plan to become an actor. He went on to star in films such as “Earthquake” and “Starcrash.”

He retired from acting in 2010. In 2019, he married Magestro, some 40 years after his 1979 divorce from his fourth wife, Candy Clark.