Richard Crenna

From Children's Radio to the Living Room

Richard Crenna didn't look like a movie star when he started in radio at the age of eleven. He earned five dollars per episode on Boy Scout Jamboree, and his voice already sounded far more mature than his birth certificate from Los Angeles suggested. That early start gave him a craft that many of his generation's peers would take decades to understand.

He spent his youth hopping from one microphone to another on shows like A Date with Judy and Our Miss Brooks. On the latter, he played Walter Denton for years (first on the airwaves and then on screen) until audiences began to see him as the eternally awkward teenager. But Crenna knew his look called for other kinds of roles.

Crenna was never a diva.

In 1957, he accepted the role of Luke McCoy in The Real McCoys, and the series stayed on the air for six seasons. That job earned him enough money to start directing his own episodes and to understand the inner workings of the industry. He directed more than thirty episodes of the show before deciding that his time as a television rancher was over.

The Colonel Kirk Douglas Didn't Want to Be

His move into serious films came in 1966 when he shot The Sand Pebbles alongside Steve McQueen. He was no longer the funny guy from television. A year later, he played one of Audrey Hepburn's stalkers in Wait Until Dark and proved he could be genuinely unsettling on screen. Director Terence Young used his cold stare to break away from his previous image as the good neighbor.

And then came the role that would give him a golden retirement.

Kirk Douglas walked away from the set of First Blood in 1982 because he didn't like that the character of John Rambo survived at the end of the film. The production was desperate, and it called Crenna on a Friday to join the project the following Monday in the mountains of British Columbia. He accepted the challenge of playing Colonel Samuel Trautman with barely any time to rehearse his lines.

That no-nonsense military man became the moral center of a franchise that grossed more than $125 million on its first installment alone. Crenna reprised the role in 1985 and 1988 because he fully understood that the colonel was the only person capable of humanizing a killing machine. But he never took the character too seriously.

In 1993, he agreed to parody himself in Hot Shots! Part Deux.

The Final Chapter of a Character Actor

During the 1990s, he found refuge in TV movies and prestigious supporting roles. By 1985, he had already won an Emmy Award for his work in The Rape of Richard Beck, which earned him a level of respect that lasted until his final days. He never chased gossip magazine covers, but there was always a contract waiting on his desk.

His work pace didn't slow with age. In 1999, he joined the cast of Judging Amy to play Jared Duff and stayed with the project for as long as his health allowed. He was still the same professional who arrived on set with his script memorized and no demands for a special dressing room.

Richard Crenna died in January 2003 at a Los Angeles hospital from heart failure caused by pancreatic cancer. He was 76 years old and left behind a filmography of more than one hundred titles across film and television. His character on the CBS series had to be abruptly written out of the storylines due to his death during filming of the show's fourth season.