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Peter Graves was born Peter Duesler Aurness on March 18, 1926 in Minneapolis, Minnesota, the younger son of Rolf Cirkler Aurness (1894–1982), a businessman, and his wife, Ruth (née Duesler, died 1986), a journalist.Graves’s ancestry was Norwegian, German, and English. He used the stage name Graves, a maternal family name, to honor his mother’s family, and also so as to not be confused with his elder brother’s stage name James Arness, star of the television series Gunsmoke.
