Richard Anderson(1926-2017)
- Actor
- Producer
Richard Anderson appeared in high school plays, served a hitch in the United
States Army and, upon his discharge, began doing summer stock, radio work, a
movie bit part (a wounded soldier in Un homme de fer (1949)) and all the other minor
jobs required of your basic struggling actor. He did comedy scenes on a
"screen test"-like TV series called Lights, Camera, Action! (1950) and impressed the right
people at MGM, who offered him a contract. After leaving MGM he
continued to dabble in movies while at the same time becoming a huge
presence on TV. He was a regular (Police Lt. Drum) during the last
season of TV's Perry Mason (1957); in the series' last episode, he interrogated
witnesses to a murder in a TV studio--the witnesses being played by the
"Perry Mason" crew. In the highly-rated last episode of Le fugitif (1963) he played
Richard Kimble's (David Janssen) brother-in-law, and is briefly suspected of
being the real killer of Kimble's wife. A regular on L'homme qui valait 3 milliards (1974), Anderson
had more recently produced the TV-movie reprises of that series.
