[1][2] David Ackroyd extended his all-stage career into film and television in the early 1970s, beginning with daytime leading man outings in The Secret Storm and Another World.
He progressed to work as Gary Ewing in Dallas until Ted Shackelford successfully took over the role when the character moved to the spin-off drama Knots Landing.
In the late 1970s, he appeared in the miniseries The Dark Secret of Harvest Home as Nick Constantine; The Word and the TV movies And I Alone Survived and Exo-Man.
On Broadway, Ackroyd appeared in Unlikely Heroes, a 1971 production of three plays based on the stories of Philip Roth; and Children of a Lesser God, in which he replaced John Rubinstein as the lead character James Leeds in 1981.
Since the late 1990s and into the 2000s, Ackroyd has narrated documentaries on TV, including History's Mysteries and UFO Files: "Alien Engineering".