- Born
- Died
- Birth nameRichard Norman Anderson
- Height6′ 3″ (1.91 m)
- 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 Twelve O'Clock High (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 The Fugitive (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 The Six Million Dollar Man (1974), Anderson had more recently produced the TV-movie reprises of that series.- IMDb mini biography by: Tom Weaver <TomWeavr@aol.com>
- SpousesKatharine Thalberg(October 30, 1961 - May 1973) (divorced, 3 children)Carol Lee Ladd(January 22, 1955 - April 9, 1956) (divorced)
- ChildrenAshley AndersonBrooke AndersonDeva Anderson
- Removing his glasses with gravitas
- Is one of the very few actors to play the same regular character on two different series simultaneously. From 1976-78 he played Oscar Goldman on both The Six Million Dollar Man (1974) and The Bionic Woman (1976). Leo G. Carroll, Martin E. Brooks, David Hasselhoff and Fred Thompson are among the other actors to have done this.
- In The Six Million Dollar Man (1974), his character worked for a government department called the OSI. In real life, he did an orientation video for a real government department called the OSI, which was very different from the fictional one.
- Influenced to become an actor after seeing Gary Cooper on the screen, his initial screen test for MGM was from Cooper's The Cowboy and the Lady (1938).
- Studied at the Actors Laboratory in Los Angeles, which later became the Actors Studio in New York.
- When The Bionic Woman (1976) moved to NBC for the 1977-78 season, Anderson became the first actor to play the same role on two shows running on separate networks.
- When people ask me where I received my education, I tell them it was at MGM-U. The biggest lessons I learned is that acting is a talent. You can't teach it. And even if you have the talent you have to get a part.
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