Michael Allan Purcilly
Michael Allan Purcilly was a man of defiance and endurance. If it is true that a cat can defy death nine times to live nine lives, then this man has surely surpassed the cat, all the while helping many other lives to live longer, too.
Michael graduated from Santa Barbara’s own Brooks Institute of Photography in the 70s to go on to assist in the photographic creation of major iconic advertisements in New York City with famous photographers such as Richard Avedon and Hiro during the heyday of the infamous Studio 54 gang of creatives. In the 80s, he turned toward Leo Burnett of Chicago to assist in both the photography and production of the ever-enduring Marlboro Man campaigns as well as many Hollywood iconic portraitures. And in the 90s, he produced game-changing automobile advertising campaigns for leading advertising agencies worldwide. Nothing was impossible and he would defy anything to make the creative directors dreams come true.
He loved to race. In his youth, he raced his Porsche around the track against the Porsche of Paul Newman and later on he raced his Ducati through the Angeles Forest with Jay Leno and his gang. It was there in the Angeles Forest that ended his first of many lives in a near-fatal accident off its cliff. Michael defied death to become a willing, and sometimes unwilling, experiment of UCLA Departments of Interventional Cardiology and Electrophysiology. This helped him to live on for more than nine lives thanks to brilliant doctors and surgeons such as Kalyanam Shivkumar who performed one of the first catheter maze procedures in the world that saved not only Michael from the prospective of a heart transplant, but also multitudes of other patients thereafter. When he was given only one year to live, he went on to live for over two decades more enduring one experiment after another even beyond UCLA. One such experiment was one of the longest robotic assisted procedures performed at Stanford University.
Michael is survived by his daughter Michaela Renee Purcilly and son Luca Allan Purcilly as well as the mother of his children Shelley Renee Noble. Shelley and Michael were married in the Autumn of 1994 at San Ysidro Ranch in an intimate ceremony within the Old Adobe, where they also baptized their daughter Michaela. Michael is survived by his father Arthur Purcilly who attended Michael’s memorial at Brooke’s Street in Laguna Beach, where Michael spent his formative years surfing. A future ceremony will take place at Hanalei, Kauai, Hawaii, where Michael often worked on location for various advertisements and spent time with his family; a place he loved and prevailed in teaching his 5-year-old daughter how to surf. When Michael could no longer surf, he loved everything about fly fishing and made time to teach his children how to fish with a fly they tied together. This made for some very good times spent in nature; good memories that endure forever.
Donations are welcomed in his honor at Surfrider Foundation.