When I was a kid, going to the movies was a special event for our family. One of my favorites, released when I was 11, was That Darn Cat … a Disney movie (of course) that starred Haley Mills (who I already loved from The Parent Trap), Dorthy Provine and Dean Jones.

Dean Jones has passed away at 84.

Dean Jones, an actor and singer who made his name in a string of popular Disney films in the 1960s and ’70s, notably as a racecar driver in the “Love Bug” franchise, died on Tuesday in Los Angeles. He was 84.

The cause was Parkinson’s disease, said a spokesman, Richard Hoffman.

Precocious and multitalented as a youth, the boyishly handsome Mr. Jones began his career as a teenage radio host and performer in amateur musical revues. He became a stage actor, and he and Jane Fonda made their Broadway debuts together. But it was not until the mid-1960s that he found his niche, as the affable, hapless, clean-cut Everyman in a series of genial family comedies produced by the Walt Disney Company, beginning in 1965 with “That Darn Cat!”

Mr. Jones’s best-known role was probably the racecar driver Jim Douglas in “The Love Bug,” the hit 1968 Disney movie about a Volkswagen Beetle with a mind of its own. He repeated the role in the 1977 sequel, “Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo,” and a 1982 television series, “Herbie, the Love Bug.” When “The Love Bug” was remade as a TV movie in 1997, Mr. Jones again played Jim, although Bruce Campbell took over as the star.

Mr. Jones made an unusual impression on the theater world in the 1970 Broadway production of Stephen Sondheim’s “Company.” Not long after the opening night of the musical — in which he played the central role of the 35-year-old bachelor Robert, an object of either envy or concern for a circle of married friends — he quit the production, citing stress and depression related to the recent collapse of his own marriage.

He soon after became a born-again Christian, and in his 1982 autobiography wrote of “Company”: “It was a clever, bright show on the surface, but its underlying message declared that marriage was, at best, a vapid compromise, insoluble and finally destructive.”

Thank you for the memories, Dean, peace be with you.

dean jones