Ricardo Montalban, king of Fantasy Island

"The plane! Boss! The plane!" For anyone who grew up in the 1970s, Ricardo Montalban, who died yesterday at the age of 88 in Los Angeles, will be indelibly linked with these words. After becoming one of Hollywood's first Latino actors to achieve leading man status (starring opposite Cyd Charisse, Lana Turner and Shelley Winters among others), he was also called on to play a mulitude of different ethnicities - from Native American to Japanese, even Babylonian. He played the superhuman Khan Noonien Singh in the original Star Trek series and reprised the role for the 1982 film, The Wrath Of Khan – before finally being cast by Robert Rodriguez as the grandfather in the Spy Kids franchise.

But like The Prisoner's Patrick McGoohan, who also died yesterday, Montalban will be remembered for one definitive TV role; Mr Roarke, the debonair host of Fantasy Island, he became a global star during the show's seven season run between 1978 and 1984.

Along with The Love Boat, Aaron Spelling's show was a purpose-built weekly showcase for a revolving cast of guest stars and jobbing actors, with everyone from Britt Ekland to Sonny Bono, Cesar Romero, Lyle Waggoner, Leslie Nielsen, Lynn Redgrave and Sammy Davis Jr all arriving on the seaplane to live out their dreams.

It was a big, primetime hit. But Fantasy Island was a lot stranger, and often darker than most of producer Spelling's other shows such as Hart to Hart or Charlie's Angels. Its central theme - be careful what you wish for - could have been lifted from the Rolling Stones: "you can't always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you just might find, you get what you need…" Roarke's initial suaveness and hospitality often gave way to a stern telling off for the guests, a breaking down of someone's dubious moral code, or even in some cases, death.

Most weeks it veered between the fluffy and the dark. Roarke and his diminutive sidekick Tattoo (played by the late Herve Villechaize), would welcome guests hoping to play out standard wish-fulfilment exercises: trying out life as a cheerleader, a king, or Dick Turpin – but they were also just as likely to be checking in a Vietnam vet who wanted to exorcise war demons, or a prostitute who wanted to live a normal life, or a salesman who wanted to hire a hitman to kill him so his family could collect on the insurance.

Like our current TV fantasy island – Lost – there's much about the show that was a mystery. Who exactly was Roarke? How did he arrange for everyone's fantasies to play out with such amazing attention to detail? Did they have a surprisingly creative hotel staff running around behind the scenes? Was it magic? A hallucination? Was he supposed to be tapping into some darker force? (In one episode he did actually take on the Devil, so maybe not.) And how did people find out about the island in the first place? What did it cost to stay there? Unlike now, where Lost fans are as consumed by the journey to find out what's actually going on with the island than they are with the week's action, audiences at the time seemed content to just take it all at face value and enjoy the trip.

In America, he also achieved a cult status fronting a long-running series of ads for Chrysler cars, in which he was seen smoothly extolling the virtues of their "soft, Corinthian leather" interiors – a total marketing invention apparently (there's no such thing); another fantasy made real by his confident delivery.